Book Reviews

Summary: Bruno loves his community, helps prevent crime, meets a new woman and solves a big crime (but not much really happens).

Bruno is one of my favorite lead characters in a mystery series. He can cook, he loves his community, he understand the real purpose of law enforcement and how to strengthen a community. The series as a whole has created an idyllic understanding of community, while maintaining an understanding of the fallenness of the world. Crime still happens, people are still abused and hated, and there is still a need for police to protect the innocent and bring about redemptive justice. Bruno is not religious in this series. There is no explicit Christian faith. But his view of justice is deeply Christian.

I purchased Fatal Pursuit (the newest book) on the day it came out. I alternately  read it on kindle or listened to the audiobook and finished in 2 days. I enjoyed the book, but it felt like a re-tread of previous books. There was a major crime, there was a connection to WWII history, a new woman in the community for Bruno to consider, a new aspect of the very small community that had never been mentioned before (in this case a community amusement park), and yet another connection to international terrorism in his small community.

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Takeaway: Taxes, abuse of power, responsiveness to the citizenry, and corruption seem to be involved in most revolutions.

My European history is lousy. I doubt I will every have a really good handle on European history, but short books like The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction help.

This good addition to the Very Short Introduction series. The book is just over 100 pages of real material. There are six chapters: Echoes; Why It Happened; How It Happened; What It Ended; What It Started; and Where It Stands.

In a short introduction like this, there is not room for a detailed look at the events of the revolution. A broad overview, along with cultural and historical implication is the main focus.

I had a couple of thoughts when reading. First, economics are almost always important to revolutions. But not necessarily directly. The French revolution occurred after some tax cuts and the average person was a bit better off. However overspending on the military and empire still distorted the fundamental economics.

Both the aristocracy and the church share some blame for the revolution. In both cases there were signs that their power and finances were unsustainable in the long term. Instead of voluntarily giving up power, finances and authority for the good of the country as a whole, they were ultimately reduced to a fraction of their previous state. I always think the church should understand giving up power and finances to gain cultural voice and authority. But that seems to be a hard lesson to learn, even when it is part of our faith.

I also did not realize the extent that the church was repressed in France. It went badly for everyone and in many ways it is odd to me that the Soviet Union and later China (and others) did not learn the lesson about the repression of the church and faith from the earlier French revolution.

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I am reposting this 2014 review because the Kindle Edition is on sale for $2.99
Summary: A 14 year marriage is in danger, and a magic phone to the past may be just the thing the marriage needs to be saved.

Rainbow Rowell is definitely now in my list of “˜favorite authors’. Like most I first heard about her because of her breakout book Eleanor and Park. From there I moved on to Fangirl and Attachments and now Landline. Each book impressed me more than the previous one.

I, and I think many others, still think of Rowell as a young adult author.  Although even Eleanor and Park was not originally published as a young adult book. And all of the rest of her books deal primarily with adults.

So with Landline, it feels a bit like Rowell is again trying to breaking free of her young adult label and writing a much heavier and more adult oriented novel.

Georgie McCool (yes it is her real name) is a TV script writer. Just days before Christmas, and the day before her family is scheduled to fly to Omaha to spend Christmas with her Mother in Law, her dream comes true. A Network wants to see a script for a pilot and four additional episodes for her own series.

But that means that she cannot go to Omaha with her husband (Neal) and daughters. And instead she will have to stay in LA and write with her best friend and writing partner, Seth.

When Neal decides that he is taking the girls and going to Omaha anyway, instead of staying and having Christmas with her, it creates a crisis for Georgie. She realizes that she has checked out of her marriage in many ways. That her husband has been unhappy for a while. That she has not even been taking care of her own basic needs let alone the needs of her family.

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Summary: Lord Wimsey is vacationing in an artist’s community when one of the artists, someone no one likes, is found dead. Five artists have motive and weak alibis.

I like reading book in a series in order, even if the order really does not matter particularly to the series. The Five Red Herrings is one of those book in a series that could have been placed in a different order and would not have mattered. It barely has Wimsey’s faithful servant Bunter or Scotland Yard and Inspector Parker. The new love interest introduced in the last book is not even mentioned. This could just as easily have been book three as book seven in the series.

The mystery itself is not bad, but a lot of it is in fairly minor details to try to establish whether alibis are valid or not. As a mystery, it is well presented but dull. Sayers has some real glimpses of brilliant writing, almost always as insights into people or situations, but those do not really make up for a mediocre book.

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A guest post from regular contributor Seth Simmons.
How Music Got Free is a totally fascinating account of the mp3 and how it almost destroyed the music industry.

The story begins with a history of the invention of the mp3 by a handful of German scientists. Through trial and error and years of research, they pursued and eventually perfected an algorithm for compressing music into a file 1/12 the size of standard digital audio. In an unexpected twist, the inventors’ original conception was to support streaming of music across the web–30 years before Spotify–but that idea was too far ahead of its time.

After the mp3 lost music technology’s first “format war” to a similar but inferior encoding method (the mp2)–it was designed by a competing group that outmaneuvered them politically–the nascent format staged a comeback through a number of steps (and mis-steps) that would both solidify its dominance and drastically reduce its money-making potential. The inventors licensed the technology to the NHL for use in broadcasting compressed audio of game commentary; they released encoding software to the web for free; they declined to register for a patent on the first mp3 player, thinking of it as simply a hard drive; they convinced Microsoft to license the mp3 for their media player, and thus got a small cut every time somebody bought a copy of Windows.

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