Category: Books

Book Review: The Only Woman in the Room – by Marie Benedict

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was a young Austrian Jewish woman, born in 1914. She grew up in a well-to-do family with a doting father who taught her critical thinking and scientific methodology. She was very smart but also beautiful. In her youth, she was attracted to acting, first in motion pictures and then in the theater.

The story starts in 1933, when Hedy was just 19 years old. While on stage playing an Austrian empress, a mystery suiter showered her with elaborate displays of roses night after night after the performances. It turns out the suiter was Austrian arms manufacturer Friedrich (Fritz) Mandl, who was at the time Austria’s richest man. Not only was he a businessman, but also well connected at the highest level of Austrian politics. At that time, Hitler had just come to power in Germany and his antisemitic policies were feared in Austria. When Fritz proposed marriage, Hedy’s parents advised her to accept, both to not upset a powerful man by refusing his wishes, but also to be a protector to Jews. They sensed that they might need it.

Very quickly, starting even during the wedding preparations, Hedy realized that her future husband was extremely possessive, jealous and both emotionally and physically abusive. She had sold her life to protect her family. While married to Fritz, however, she was exposed to high level discussions about arms developments, including shortcomings and problems with guidance systems for torpedoes. Posing as a demure wife, never speaking, she was always the only woman in the room, but the listened very carefully and learned.

Eventually her outwardly opulent life became an unbearable prison, and she escaped to America. There she restarted her acting career, taking on the name of Hedy Lamarr, in order not to seem Jewish. There was strong antisemitism in Hollywood during the 1930s. She quickly became a movie star.

But that also was not enough for her. In an effort to help the American military with its lacking guidance technology for torpedoes, she and composer George Antheil developed a frequency-hopping communication system intended to help prevent enemy interference with radio-guided torpedoes. Their patented work later became an important precursor to technologies used in modern wireless communications.

The book The Only Woman in the Room is based on Hedy Lamarr’s life, but the author fictionalizes dialogue, private thoughts, motivations, and many scenes, so you should not read it as a literal biography.

Her actual life was even more colorful than is depicted in the book. If you are interested, you can look up her Wikipedia entry here. She was married a whopping six times and divorced every time. She was even arrested several times for (believe it or not) shoplifting. Eventually she passed away at age 85 in Florida in 2000.

Hedy later wrote an autobiography titled Ecstasy and Me ghostwritten by Leo Guild and Cy Rice. Later she disavowed the book and condemned the book’s contents as “fictional, false, vulgar, scandalous, libelous and obscene,” and claimed it was “not her book.”

To supplement your reading, you might also be interested in the Wikipedia entry for Fritz Mandl, who also had a colorful life at the fringes of fascism.

Book Review: The Cuckoo’s Calling – by Robert Galbraith

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Cormoran Strike is a private detective in London. He is a former soldier who lost his lower leg in a landmine in Afghanistan. He is deeply in debt. His detective business is faltering. His long-time girlfriend has dumped him and he is sleeping on a cot in his office.

In walks John Bristow, a lawyer with a prestigious law firm in London. His younger sister was a London supermodel who presumably committed suicide a few months earlier by jumping from her apartment on the third floor of a luxury building. John believed it was murder and wanted Cormoran to follow some leads that he provided to that effect. But most importantly, he handed him an envelope with a bundle of cash as a down payment for the services. Cormoran couldn’t pay the rent, so he didn’t have much of a choice.

Even though the police ruled it a suicide, Cormoran quickly finds circumstances that make him think otherwise. In a world of supermodels, big-ego designers, hot-shot lawyers, movie producers and all their entourage, he gets a taste of a world that ordinary citizens like him can only watch in the tabloids. The intrigues mount.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is a whodunnit crime mystery and nothing else. It is meticulously crafted like a crime story has to be. The storytelling is excellent, it keeps the suspense. The protagonist is a likable character.

Robert Galbraith is actually a pseudonym of J. K. Rowling, the author of the famous Harry Potter books. This is her debut mystery story that introduces Detective Cormoran Strike. She wanted this new line of books to stand on its own and not be affected by her fame from Harry Potter. There are currently 8 books in the series, with a planned total of 10. The Cuckoo’s Calling is book 1. 

It’s a very well written story with an intricate plot, obviously by a very experienced author. It is great entertainment. But that’s all. I didn’t learn anything, I just had fun reading. While I am giving this book 2.5 stars, making it a good read, I will not read any more of the Strike series in the interest of time. Too many books, too little time!

If you like crime novels, you’ll like this one and, I can only assume, the rest of the series.

Book Review: The Calamity Club – by Kathryn Stockett

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Four StarsLeave a comment

I tried to read the book The Help by Kathryn Stockett in 2011, and I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t choose The Calamity Club on purpose either. I wanted to try an audio book so I would have something to listen to on long walks – and I randomly chose the first book that popped up on my Audible app. I might note that this is the first time I have “read” an audio book. In written form it’s 640 pages long.

The story plays in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933,  during the height of the Great Depression. Nobody is doing well, and even many rich families are losing everything. The poor can barely survive.

Meg Lefleur was nine years old when she was abandoned by her single mother on  Christmas Eve. She was put into the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum for girls where she spent two years being abused. The big girls don’t get adopted very often, so they are neglected until they are twelve, old enough to be shipped off to factories as child slave labor.  Eleven years old as the story unfolds, Meg has learned that there is nobody she can rely on and trust but herself.

Birdie Calhoun, at age 24 and unmarried, she is the older of two sisters in a small town in the Mississippi Delta, taking care of her mother and grandmother, living in poverty.  She works as a bookkeeper. When times get desperate, she travels to Oxford where her socialite younger sister Francis has married into a banker family. She has the humiliating assignment of asking her sister’s family for money to help them get by.

She find out that everything is not as it seems.  The Depression has closed in on her sister’s family and the banking business is not going well. She quickly learns that she appears to be the only one in the family who grasps the severity of the situation they are in – they are about to lose their house to foreclosure. As life around her collapses on all sides, Birdie is the only resourceful person around, trying to remain positive and holding things together.

The entire book is told from the points of view of Meg, the child, how she sees her life, and how she copes with the abuse in the orphanage, and Birdie, the young adult. The two cross paths as Birdie volunteers at the orphanage, and their tenuous friendship ends up with huge implications for both of their lives and the lives of many others they come in contact with.

Almost all the main characters are women. The story deals with racism in the south, segregation, hypocrisy, the abuse of women on all levels, legal, societal, at the workplace, and in the home. It makes life in the 1930ies in the American South come under a spotlight, bright, depressing and often frightening.

As I said above, I didn’t read this book, I HEARED it. And it made an amazing difference. The narrators are January LaVoy, for Birdie, and Jenna Lamia for Meg. Both are extraordinary. They change their voices to a lower octave to simulate the voices of men, they take on accents of the various characters, so you can actually see in your head who is talking by the voice and the accent. Both narrators are doing a phenomenal job in that respect. I wouldn’t want to read this book now, because I’d miss the voices. I want to hear it again.

To top it all off, I didn’t want it to end. It had to end, of course, but there was so much more to experience and live. There were about a dozen people who’d become part of my life that I would like to follow some more. I am already missing them.

This book is a perfect recommendation for my wife’s book club. It does not get any better than this. Only problem, their size limit is about 400 pages, and this, with 640 pages, is a tad above that.

Be that as it may, it gets four stars from me, which means: read this!

 

 

Book Review: A Voice Like Mine – by Deb Haaland

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Cool People, Political, Three Stars2 Comments

My wife and I recently undertook a road trip of over 2,500 miles that touched six states: California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. Along the way, we stopped at Four Corners. Indian country. Driving along the endless roads in the Arizona Navajo Nation, I gave much thought to the lives of Native Americans, both now and throughout our history. Also, having just read Lonesome Dove recently, I was struck with the terrible injustices our “civilization” inflicted upon the Native American people everywhere. While in Colorado we stayed a night in Boulder, and while strolling along Pearl Street mall, I went to the Boulder Bookstore. I don’t usually buy hardcopy books anymore, but Deb Haaland’s memoir A Voice Like Mine jumped into my hands. I recently visited the New Mexico State Capitol and actually walked into the Governor’s office there. Deb Haaland is the current frontrunner for the governorship in New Mexico.

Haaland identifies herself as a 35th-generation New Mexican and descendant of the continent’s original inhabitants. I still remember being moved and impressed when Haaland was appointed Secretary of the Interior by President Biden. While I didn’t know very much about her then, to me it was a watershed time, just like the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Having a Native American woman put in charge of the U.S. Department of the Interior and its 65,000 employees was one of the most rewarding political moves I have observed in my lifetime, and I give Biden much credit for that.

During my road trip, much through Indian country, reading Deb Haaland’s memoir was a moving experience. I found myself reading passages to my wife as she was driving, sometimes with tears in my eyes.

She grew up surrounded by Native Americans. Her father was a descendant of recent Norwegian immigrants. His career was with the U.S. Marines. This combination of being a child of a military family and a Native American family gave her a unique background and insight into lives of minorities of all types. She has lived a life of poverty, alcoholism in her younger years, and single parenthood. Despite severe adversity, she managed to go to college and eventually earned a law degree. She has been a lifelong runner, including a marathon runner. As she entered politics as an organizer and a volunteer to Obama’s first campaign, she advanced to progressively higher positions and finally served as one of the first two women in the U.S. House of Representatives.

On July 22, 2019, Haaland published an opinion essay in the New York Times titled “Trump Wants Immigrants to ‘Go Back.’ Native Americans Don’t.” The essay responded to Trump’s statements that four Democratic congresswomen, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, should “go back” to other countries. One of Haaland’s quotes in the essay is:

“There is no moral high ground from which President Trump or any of his followers can tell anyone to leave this country, because they are not the first inhabitants of this land.”

In A Voice Like Mine, Deb Haaland tells the story of her life, in chronological order, with simple language and many stories and anecdotes. Since she is a dedicated cook and baker, the book is sprinkled with recipes for some of her favorite foods. Reading the book gave me a thorough insight into the woman who overcame many disadvantages and adversities to become the clear favorite for the governorship of New Mexico in the 2026 election. The race is not over, but I wish her the best of luck!

Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) – by Solvej Balle

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Tara Selter is a dealer of rare books. She travels frequently to buy and trade books, and during a trip to Paris on November 18th she wakes up the next day and discovers that it’s November 18th again. And again, and again. On the Calculation of Volume is based on the same concept as the famous movie Groundhog Day. Everyone else around Tara experiences the day anew every day, but for her, it’s the same day.

I kept reading because I wanted to find out how she would eventually solve the problem and get out of her predicament, but alas, she never did. After I finished reading the book, disappointed with the ending, I found out it’s a series of seven books.

I don’t know why it’s called On the Calculation of Volume. Salvej Balle is a pretty good writer. The books were translated from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. It is acclaimed as a literary series. While it sounds like science fiction, the series is supposedly much more philosophical than action-oriented. It explores themes such as the nature of time and memory, loneliness and marriage, identity and personal growth, the way humanity uses resources and finding meaning in life when the future has disappeared.

All those concepts may be important and interesting, but I found the book outright boring, and I certainly won’t be reading the other six in the series. The only interesting concept is that of Groundhog Day, but that was well explored in the old movie and didn’t need a retake.

Book Review: Lonesome Dove – by Larry McMurtry

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Four StarsLeave a comment

I recently browsed a Reddit post that asked “what is the best book you have ever read” and the first post was “Lonesome Dove.” As I progressed scrolling, there were many books I had read myself, and I agreed that they were very good, but the most common one named was one I had not read:  Lonesome Dove.

My favorite book: there are so many that I would be afraid to say. Probably if I had to pick anything I’d say Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.

—Stephen King

So I finally read it myself.

Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. The book is 864 printed pages long and it took me quite a while to read it. It’s an epic Western.

The story starts around 1876 in the hot of dusty town of Lonesome Dove on the Texas side of the Rio Grande in south Texas. There are just a few houses, a blacksmith, and of course a saloon with a single prostitute. 

Two retired Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae whom they call Gus or Mr. Gus and Woodrow Call whom everyone calls Captain Call or the Captain, live together on a ranch with a cantankerous cook and a few ranch hands, many of them former Texas Rangers, with nothing much to do. One day they decide t0 pick up stakes and go on a cattle drive to Montana. In those days, Montana was untamed wilderness. The Captain had the vision to be the first one there to start a cattle ranch. Along the way, they face unspeakable dangers, from the weather, perilous heat and drought, snakes, bears, outlaws, horse thieves and Indians.

Besides the two protagonists there is an unforgettable cast of characters, all of them deeply developed, their lives intertwined and their fates interconnected, to make for a kaleidoscopic story of lust, love, regret, hope, sorrow, pain, loyalty, grit, grit and grit, showing us the unyielding spirit of the American West.

The story plays just 100 years before I myself landed there in the Arizona desert in 1977. How much has changed since then, and yet, how much does the land still look the same! Today I can drive from Texas to Montana in three days. It took the cattle drive six months.

I learned so much. For instance, I studied up on the Texas Rangers. Before reading Lonesome Dove, Texas Rangers just were some exotic law enforcement men in – yes, Texas. Now I know they are among the oldest law-enforcement institutions in the United States. The Ranger tradition is generally traced to 1823, when Stephen F. Austin arranged for small groups of armed men to “range” through the territory and protect Anglo-American settlements. The provisional Texas government formally authorized a Ranger force in 1835, shortly before the Texas Revolution.

I also realized how brutal and lawless life was in the West in those days. Romanticized westerns are not giving us the right, clear picture. Read Lonesome Dove and understand, yes – feel the brutality of life for those early settlers in the West. Read Lonesome Dove and get a sense of the utter cruelty that was inflicted on the Native Americans and how they were systematically decimated and brutalized by the white conquerors. Read Lonesome Dove and forever change your view of the romantic “Cowboys and Indians” lore that we have all been spoon fed with.

Lonesome Dove was the first book of what became a series of four books, two prequels and one sequel.

There is also an epic miniseries for television: Lonesome Dove (1989): The foundational miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, which follows the retired Rangers on their arduous cattle drive from Texas to Montana. In addition, several other series have been created about the prequels and sequels. I will first watch the 1989 series to match the book I have just read, and I may follow through with the other ones, if I decide to read those (if I find the time).

Lonesome Dove will definitely be on my personal list of the top 10 best books I have ever read.

4 stars

Book Review: The Dog Stars – by Peter Heller

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

It’s about 9 years after a global pandemic, where a deadly flu killed 99.9 percent of the population. If that makes you think of Stephen King’s The Stand, you are right on. The Stand is one of my favorite books of all time.

After 9 years, all gasoline has become stale. Regular unleaded gas gets old after a few months and will be unusable after a year. Cars and motorcycles can no longer drive. Too bad, Mad Max!  However, Jet fuel, because it is a highly refined kerosene, lasts much longer, and with additives can be used for years.

Hig is a forty-something man and an experienced pilot. He maintains “the Beast,” a 1956 Cessna he keeps at his home base at a small airport in Colorado. He lost his family and his wife. The only friend he has left is his dog, Jasper. One day a gun-toting crazy guy named Bangley arrives and the two of them live in a strange symbiosis keeping each other alive fending off marauders and attackers – with Bangley doing most of the killing. 

During one of his flights he hears a strange transmission and he hopes, against all odds, that there are other people out there that are not out to kill them. He fills up his plane with provisions and flies beyond his capacity to return home (there is only that much gas he can carry) in hope of finding a better life.

The author writes in a strange, chopped style, with sentence fragments, and pretty much no dialog. It takes a little time to get used to it, but it grew on me quickly and I kept turning the pages. Life in America after an apocalypse comes alive in this novel and it will scare the shit out of you. No matter how hopeless, how brutal, how demoralizing every day is, when I was done reading this book, I closed it and I immediately missed it. I wanted to know what would happen next.

 

Interestingly, after I finished reading The Dog Stars just a few days ago, I came across this movie poster when browsing Reddit. Looks like it’ll be in the theaters in late August.

 

I am definitely going to see this.

Book Review: Going Zero – by Anthony McCarten

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

The tech company WorldShare was started by a hacker named Cy Baxter. By creating spyware and surveillance technology called Fusion he became a billionaire. Working with the CIA, they came up with a program to test this spyware. Ten random Americans have been carefully selected to test Fusion. If any of the candidates can evade detection for one month, they win a prize of three million dollars. So starts “an amazing race” to stay underground and off the grid.

Going Zero is a fast-paced action story that had me rooting for the contestants.  I thought I was learning a lot about surveillance technology and the police state that we are all living in now. But as I progressed through the book, I had my doubts grow over time, as the technologies became more and more unbelievable and even outrageous. Toward the end of the book, I started calling bullshit.

For example, this author has no idea what databases are, and what database sizes are:

But is that even possible, to download so vast a database, this catalog of every person ever investigated for some misdeed by the U.S. government? God knows how much data that would be! More than teraflops for sure; there would be more like peta- or exa- or zetta- or even yottaflops of it. Just how criminal is America?

— page 243

First of all, data sizes are not counted in “flops” but “bytes.” Flops are “floating point operations” and those are a unit of measurement for computer processing speeds. Like a gigaflop is a billion floating point operations a second. Measuring database sizes by processing speed makes no sense at all. It would be like saying “I just had twenty degrees Fahrenheit for lunch.”

But let’s assume he actually meant bytes:

  • Two pages of typed text is a kilobyte
  • A short novel is a megabyte
  • I pickup truck full of books is a gigabyte
  • Estimates are that every word ever spoken by human beings is about 5 exabytes, an exabyte being a million terabytes.
  • A yottabyte would be a trillion trillion bytes.

Saying in once sentence that a database expert like CyBaxter would ruminate whether the database he is trying to download is definitely more than a terabyte, but might even be a yottabyte, is ludicrous, since the difference between the two is a factor of a trillion. Kind of a big difference.

Then he is downloading this database and making a copy of it. Hmm, to download  just an exabyte of data with today’s fastest technology would take hundreds of thousands of years. According to Paul McFedries’ book Word Spy, it would take approximately 86 trillion years to download a one yottabyte file.

Yet, Cy apparently does it in a matter of minutes. And he needs to store all that data:

Plus, he has all the links he needs right now to vast data farms where he could route and hide a downloaded copy.

That action is a significant part of the plot of the story at the end, but to anyone who actually understands this stuff it’s complete nonsense.

Of course, this obvious lack of understanding by the author undermines the credibility of much of the other surveillance technology that is central to the plot of the book. I am not an expert on surveillance technology, but if it’s as far off the mark as his database knowledge, then that too is all nonsense.

I did read the whole book. There was good suspense and action that kept me turning the pages, but the techno-fluff and the general billionaire adoration watered down the whole experience.

Book Review: Unwanted Starship – by John Walker and David Brown

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Two Stars2 Comments

Ethan Cross is a machine maintenance technician who works the second shift at Meridian Industrial, a manufacturing company that uses big machines, like hydraulic presses. He lives a quiet life with no wife or girlfriend, no family, and just a few good friends, all from work. One night he is called into the backyard to diagnose a machine problem when he sees something impossible right there between old steel drums, discarded pallets and the general detritus a manufacturing plant will spawn. It looks like a big hulking thing that makes no sense to him. Then he touches it, and nothing is like it was ever before.

It turns out the thing is an ancient alien spaceship, generated by an ancient and extinct galactic race they call “the Elders” who had technology unlike any race in the galaxy ever was able to recreate, and they had it more than 13 million years ago. The spaceship Ethan touched is of that vintage, and it made Ethan its owner and pilot, but also its victim. The neural bond between she ship and the owner can’t be broken, unless the owner dies.

Left with no choice, Ethan takes the ship to the stars. Soon he is a stranger in a strange land, in a vast galaxy, populated by dozens of intelligent and spacefaring alien species, most of which want him dead because they want to get their hands on his ship – and the Elder technology it is made of.

It sounds like a cool story which was a fun read, and I kept turning the pages, but in the end most of the world, the galaxy, was pretty trite.

All the aliens were basically bi-symmetrical,  bipedal humanoids, with knee joints, elbows, albeit one key species had an extra arm joint. Most of them had faces, ears, eyes and mouths. Magic trick 1 was they all spoke into translators which allowed them to seamlessly communicate across species, including human English, right from the start. Magic trick 2 was that interstellar travel with ships seemed effortless, through  a variety of portals, where space bent on itself. Magic trick 3 was that they all communicated instantaneously over hundreds of lightyears using some “quantum technology.” Magic trick 4 was that somehow all planets and space stations seemed to have just the right air mix, temperature and pressure to suit humans, and all aliens. Nobody seemed to need any space suits.

Picture yourself in the bar in the early Star Wars movies where all the aliens just hung out and ate and drank, like humans in alien suits, jolly and jovial.

Cute, but not serious enough science fiction for me to want to read the other books of the Unwanted Starship series.

Book Review: The Lost Bookshop – by Evie Woods

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

The Lost Bookshop is the story of Opaline, a woman who lived in England in the 1920s, and Martha and  Henry, who are contemporaries. All three of them are book lovers and in their individual journeys, they come together in unexpected ways.

The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of the three main characters, where Opaline lived over a hundred years before the other two. As the plot develops, we learn how Opaline’s life affected Martha’s and Henry’s in unexpected ways.

The main themes are illustrating the class system of English society, and above all the role women played as sub-humans, basically the chattel of the men in their lives, which was very true for Opaline a hundred years ago, and still true for Martha today due to her abusive husband.

The story weaves around Emily Bronte’s only novel, the classic Wuthering Heights. The characters believe that she might have written another manuscript that was never published before she died at age 30 from tuberculosis. Wuthering Heights became one of the most famous works in English literature shortly after she died.

One might say this book is about Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights, because the entire plot is developed around her character. So much so that I decided to dust off the book in my Kindle library and start reading it again. See my review here.

The Lost Bookshop is an entertaining read, full of nostalgia, some outright magic, quite a bit of mystery and above all outrage about the suffering of women, through history, and up to today.

Book Review: Squeezed – by David Atkinson

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

Squeezed was recommended by friends years ago; they thought it was “really funny.” But after reading the description, I passed. Just a few weeks ago, I read another book by this author, Future Proof, and I liked it. When creating that review, I came across Squeezed again and finally decided to go for it.

Squeezed is a book I almost didn’t finish reading. I even have a category in this blog: Books not finished reading. And I don’t rate those. Sometimes I drop out after just a few pages. Sometimes I make it to 50%. With Squeezed, I lost interest at 10%, then again at 20% and again at 50%. Fortunately, I just had knee surgery, and I had a lot of time on my hands with not much to do and no better books in the queue, so I just kept going. Well, here it is.

Scott and Hannah have been together for seven years, they had two children, and the two finally were able to go on a honeymoon in Thailand. While in their hotel room, Hannah told Scott she had ordered a prostitute to spice up their evening with a threesome. She didn’t discuss that with him, and he didn’t really have much say in the matter, because the “package was on the way.” Thirty minutes later “Marilyn” showed up, and matters commenced.

They proceeded with their vacation and went back to their home in Edinburgh, Scottland, and continued with their modest lives, where taking care of their two young daughters and holding up their middle-class jobs took all their energy. They lived in a tiny and cramped apartment, and they shared a beater car. But there was happiness in their lives, and love, or so it seemed.

One day, during a terrible blizzard, their apartment doorbell rang. Marilyn from Thailand stood there, inadequately dressed, and six months pregnant. She said Scott was the father. They had no choice but to invite her in and set her up on their couch. 

Now they had some explaining to do, to their friends, to their parents and families, and – as it turned out pretty quickly – to the authorities.

Squeezed is a story about hapless family that is trying to make a living against all odds and yet has to deal with life’s adversities whether they are ready for them or not. 

The reviews said that I’d be laughing out loud from the first page on, that Squeezed was a romantic comedy.  I didn’t think that at all. It was funny here and there, but it was no comedy. It was slow and boring at times, as the author went into great detail about things that didn’t seem to matter in the plot, but I just kept plowing on, as I said above, and in the end, I found the story rewarding.

 

Book Review: Artemis – by Andy Weir

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science, Science Fiction, Three StarsLeave a comment

I just read Artemis, by Andy Weir, now, a few days after the NASA mission to the moon, Artemis II, safely returned to earth. Andy Weir catapulted to fame with his first book, The Martian, in 2011,  which I reviewed here. Artemis is his second book, released in 2017, before NASA officially named its new lunar program Artemis in 2019. So Weir didn’t copy the mission name. Both drew the name from Greek mythology. Artemis is the goddess of the moon and the twin sister of Apollo.

Jasmine Bashara goes by the name of Jazz. She is a very smart young woman, the daughter of a Saudi welder who raised her as a single father. She lived her childhood and adult life in Artemis, the only city on the moon.

She is poor and works as a porter. Think of it as a DoorDash person, picking up and delivering packages. She lives in a coffin-sized apartment and subsists on what all poor Artemisians live on, gunk, which is flavored algae. She wants to get wealthy enough to afford her own apartment, with a private bathroom and enough room to stand up and stretch.

Through her connections, a score comes her way that could make her rich and end her worries. She goes for it. Little does she know that the heist quickly draws her into a global conspiracy and a war between the mob, billionaires, and the city’s elite. At the end, she not just fighting for her own life, but the survival of the city of Artemis itself.

There is a lot of science in this book, particular chemistry. I happen to be a scientific person, I know my math, biology and physics, but somehow I was able to escape chemistry all my life. It’s the big educational gap is my background. In this book I learned a lot about chemistry.

True to his style, just like in The Martian, Weir stays very close to the science. We get to know how pressure equalization and airlocks work. We learn about smelters, and how to turn lunar regolith into aluminum and oxygen, two of the essential elements needed if you want to build a city on the moon and survive in it.

It only took me a few days to finish this book. I kept turning the pages. I now have read all three of Weir’s books,  and I am sure I will read the fourth – whenever that comes out.

Book Review: Future Proof – by David Atkinson

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three Stars, Time TravelLeave a comment

Sam Harris is a washed-up loser. He is unhealthy and grossly overweight, living in a trashed apartment, from which he is getting evicted. His assigned social worker transfers him to an experimental counseling program. All he has to do is to agree with the treatments, and in exchange he get a clean bed, three meals a day and – counseling. Since he does not have any other options, he agrees.

We learn that is childhood was not a happy one. He was severely bullied in school and never really recovered. None of his relationships worked out for him.

During the first medical treatment, he gets an injection which puts him to sleep. He has an ultra-vivid dream, placing him back into the elementary school, right into a situation where we was abused by several bullies. With his adult brain, memories and experiences in place, his 6-year-old self defends himself against the bullies. Eventually, when that fateful day is over and he goes to sleep, he wakes up again on the treatment bed in the facility.

He quickly discovers that things are different. First and foremost, he is no longer fat. He has a trim and fit body, and the memories of being bullied are gone. Everyone else, however, does not notice any changes. The therapists never knew him as overweight. They don’t recognize the changes. Over the next few days he realizes that he actually time-traveled into his childhood for a day and the changes he made at that pivotal time, like standing up to the bullies, made him a different person and changed the timeline of the rest of the world around him.

Figuring  that nobody will believe him, he keeps the secret to himself, with further plans for more changes during his next therapy trip.

But how much can he change without severely affecting world history?

Future Proof is a unique time travel story where time travel occurs in an unusual way. That gives it a unique spice. The author’s writing is easy to read and cleverly narrated. It’s overall a well-crafted novel and one of the better time travel stories I have read.

Book Review: Lost Lambs- by Madeline Cash

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

Lost Lambs is the story of the dysfunctional Flynn family. The father Bud is an accountant who thinks of his job as boring and dead-end. But he is dedicated to his family. The mother Catherine is an artist at heart, but an artist who has not created anything in years. She was consumed raising her three daughters, but even that she did not do very well. Abigail is the oldest daughter, a senior in high school and stunningly beautiful. She is the most sought-after girl in school. Louise is 15, quiet and somewhat mousy. She has an online boyfriend named yourstruly whom she has never met. Finally, Harper, at 12 years old the youngest, is a child prodigy. She can learn a new language in a few weeks, if she decides she wants to. She outsmarts everyone in her family.

Catherine one day gets enamored with their neighbor, Jim Doherty. They hang out, talk art, and eventually develop romantic feelings for each other. Catherine suggests to Bud that they open up their marriage to freshen up their lives and relationship. Bud objects, saying that fucking the neighbor isn’t going to make their marriage work, but he does not get much say in the matter. This sets of a chain of events that involves everyone in the family, and their circle of friends, as well as their church.

When Harper uncovers a vast and possibly criminal conspiracy involving the tech billionaire shipping magnate who lives in their town, things quickly spiral out of control and threaten to tear the family apart.

Lost Lambs is Madeline Cash’s debut novel. She has a witty writing style, accentuated with a lot of humor, some satire, and an unusual angle from which to look at the world.

She is about 29 years old. Her actual birthdate is not published. She is one of the most talked-about debut authors of 2026. I came across the book because my wife’s book club is currently reading it. Sometimes I pick up their recommendations. I did this one, and it just kept me turning the pages with delight.

Book Review: Stranded – by A. K. DuBoff

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half Stars, Science FictionLeave a comment

Stranded is Book 1 of five books in the Starship of the Ancients series.

In the distant future, humanity has spread to many different planets in many different star systems, and it continues to spread out by sending colony ships with thousands of people to new stars and planets. Those journeys are hugely expensive  and are undertaken by massive corporations. Humanity is controlled by an elected government, headed by a chancellor.

When the ship arrives at its destinations, an accident occurs, the ship explodes, with most settlers getting killed. Only a few dozen manage to escape in landing pods. They find themselves on an alien planet, full of dangerous predators.

Evan is a former soldier who was assigned to an undercover investigation of a criminal cartel. When his cover was broken, he was sent away in this ship on short notice in a witness-protection situation. When he lands on the planet, he meets Anya, a xenobiologist who was involved in the planning of the mission. The two now work together to solve the puzzle of what happened to the ship, and to try to create a stronghold where the few dozen survivors can eek out a living on an alien world without any supply line.

They quickly discover that the accident may not have been an accident at all, and somebody tried to kill them all. There seems to be a criminal conspiracy that permeates the government and all of humanity.

Stranded is well written and I found myself turning the pages. It’s obviously a space opera, with a lot of politics. There is a government covering many planets over many star systems, obviously many light years apart. The ships can travel between the stars through gates instantaneously. And somehow they can also communicate over those distances, presumably through relays through the gates, instantaneously. There is no time-dilation. There seem to be no fuel or resource problems for that kind of travel. The story  plays in a world “in the stars” but it’s no different than countries on earth, now that we have instantaneous communication methods. It’s not really science fiction, it’s political fiction.

The characters, even the protagonists, are pretty shallow and superficial. There is a lot of exposition and not much dialog. Often the interactions and emotions are inconsistent. At one point they make a decision they have to go on an overland expedition to find the wreckage of a ship so they can obtain its communications gear, and then later they express that they wish they had never left. This kind of behavior keeps happening and makes the story unrealistic.

Of course, from the subtitle “starship of the ancients” we know that there is some alien technology involved. The main plot is about the race to find an ancient alien starship with technology that all humanity wants. This is kind of trite and has been done many times over, with the Starship in the Stone just being the most recent one I have come across.