Star Wars: Tag & Bink were here
Fun summary of the Star Wars series from the point of view of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Three stars.
Inside Delta Force: the story of America's elite counterterrorist unit, Haney (Y)
How Eric Haney got selected and trained to be in one of the founding members of Delta Force: very cool overcoming high odds and how they got trained by the best of the best in a wide variety of fields (including cat burglars!). This is the younger readers version of the book of the same name published in '02. Fun read. Three stars.
Team Moon: how 400,000 people landed Apollo 11 on the moon, Thimmesh (Y)
This won some awards, but the text is really a bit... overdramatic? Maybe theatrical is the word, but the stories of the huge technical backing for the Apollo project really shine through, and the author makes excellent use of direct quotes and photographs. Three stars.
The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! : pageantry and patriotism in Cold-War America / Richard M. Fried.
The rise (and fall) of I am an American Day, Communist takeovers of Mossinee WI, and Armed Forces Day parade. A very interesting look at a very particular sort of political theater in 1950s USA. And it turns out that very little has changed: much of it was in response to low voter turnout! Well, and fear of unions. Three stars.
Animals Aloft: photographs from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum / Allan Janus.
All of the info and photos are from the archives, some with only caption-type information available, and some with only a thin connection to flying. The pictures are really cool though. I really liked the flying cats. Two stars.
Prom Dates from Hell, Clement-Moore (Y)
Maggie Quinn's second sight (and second smell!) has her detecting an evil force when "accidents" happen to her high-school classmates. Who's behind the Evil taking out someone's grudges? Really well structured and fun mystery with supernatural center. Four stars.
Snatched, Hautman and Logue (Y)
One of those books that wasn't that great for me, but I could recognize its greatness for other readers: middle school readers and teens with a low reading ability. Vocab not too high, very short chapters, not too much character development or setting detail to overwhelm the action that kept moving along, and no swears to upset the teachers. Three stars for being the best it could be.
Life as we knew it, Pfeffer (Y)
So a comet hits the moon, knocks its orbit askew, and global ecological disaster ensues. The survival (barely) of a 16 year old girl's family is told through her diary. Gripping, yes, and you feel guilty that you can go and get a snack while her family is nearly starving, living off the last of the canned goods. But here's what detracted from the whole experience: the science seemed fairly shaky (Why exactly would a changed lunar orbit make lots of volcanoes erupt? Why would it cause electrical storms?) and the family seemed terribly naive about survival, even for a suburban family (They run out of yeast. Do none of them know how yeast works? They seem to think they need to boil the snow they melt for water for safety's sake. Why? It doesn't occur to them to filter the volcanic-dust filled melted snow, or let the dust settle out, or distill the water. They make no attempt to find wild foods. They make no attempt to eat any of the stockpiled cat food. Or the cat. Any book about actual historical famines is filled with the inventive and desperate measures people who are actually starving will take. This family didn't try very hard.). So four stars for a hard-to-put-down book, but it loses points on detail.
It is sometimes confusing to apply my work skills to my own life-- it sometimes seems like a strange mixing of my worlds to give myself a reference interview. But sure enough, what I was thinking I would have to cobble together myself is already out there. Thank you AARP!
Per the Motley Fool:
Sonic stands apart from peers McDonald's, Wendy's, and Yum! Brands for its aggressive use of national TV advertising, introducing its concept to locales that have yet to see one of its signature drive-ins.The result? Anticipation. Says Hudson: “Our average unit volume in these newer drive-ins, in these newer states, [where] we've had several years of national advertising ... are averaging over $2 million in sales.”
Here's why you should still care about privacy. I haven't read the whole article, but it cites Bruce Schneier, so it can't be all bad.
The astonishing life of Octavian Nothing, traitor to the nation; v.1, The Pox Party, Anderson. No. While the writing is not painful, it never really raises itself to the level of true goodness. The most interesting aspects of the book are historical, and, as the author points out in an afterword, you should read history if you're interested in the history.
The BBC was made to apologize for editing a promo in a way that seemed to imply that the Queen had walked out of a photo session. Maybe the English are just very sensitive to editing (the article I'm referring to is the 12 April entry), and what Queen couldn't get from Fox, The Queen could from the BBC.
and 99 views of Edo would not be enough: 100 (and some bonus tracks) views of Edo.
Having walked past the Nintendo Fan Network booth several times this year, I hadn't imagined it was so new and exciting.
Party Monster, St. James (formerly Disco Bloodbath: A Fabulous but True Tale of Murder in Clubland)
I grabbed this because I liked Party Monster: the Shockumentary (I'm a fan of Bailey and Barbato) and because James St. James has a teen novel coming out and I wondered what the writing would be like. Well, I'm much more optimistic about the teen novel and I want to re-watch the Shockumentary and watch the movie to see what translates and what doesn't. Disco Bloodbath is a really well structured true crime book, a really immersive portrait of the time, and a very well-handled explanation of how JSJ was involved in the scene and affected by the murder. It gives hints of the lessons learned later in the description of the moments in the past. I really liked it (though as a reprint they really should have fixed some typos and misspellings!). Four stars.