What are you reading?

[table1349]

Just finished Five Little Pigs (Agatha Christie) for fun so now back to serious reading. Just started Nancy Wake (Peter FitzSimons). Biography of an Australian woman working in the French Underground during WW II.

 

[Fred von den Berg]

Recent reads include City of Glass (Paul Auster), The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (Evelyn Waugh), Rain (W.Somerset Maugham) and The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov).

Have just started A Song of Ice and Fire (George R.R.Martin).

 

[KmH]

Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation - Edward Humes

Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist & explores the hidden and costly wonders of our buy-it-now, get-it-today world of transportation, revealing the surprising truths, mounting challenges, and logistical magic behind every trip we take and every click we make.

Transportation has changed, and will continue to change, global trade, our commutes, our vehicles, our cities, our jobs, every aspect of culture, commerce, and the environment.

Just in time manufacturing sources the parts needed to assemble a product from all over the world.
By the time an iPhone gets into a user's hand the total mileage all the various parts have traveled from their respective points of manufacture to final assembly at Foxconn in China and to the user is about 600,000 miles.

Hume cites university studies that put Apple's profit per iPhone at 58% of the retail cost of an iPhone. Likely the best example on the planet of price gouging consumers of electronic gear.

Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation

 

[Domko]

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem. I'm catching up on his books after not having read any for several years. This one is as good as anything he's written. I'm not sure why I missed some of his stuff.

 

[BananaRepublic]

I wonder how much of the deforestation of the Amazon can be chalked up to to all the self help books mentioned in this thread.

 

[KmH]

The definitive account of how America’s War on Terror sparked a decade-long assault on the rule of law, weakening our courts and our Constitution in the name of national security.

Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State - Karen J. Greenberg

How did America veer so far from its founding principles of justice? Rogue Justice connects the dots for the first time—from the Patriot Act to today’s military commissions, from terrorism prosecutions to intelligence priorities, from the ACLU’s activism to Edward Snowden’s revelations. And it poses a stark question: Will the American justice system ever recover from the compromises it made for the war on terror?

 

[table1349]

Finished The Scourge of the Swastika, by Edward Frederick Langley Russell. Starting Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen Ambrose.

 

[KmH]

Dream Hoarders
How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It
By Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution

Just finished The Circle by Dave Eggers.
The ending sucked - big time.

 

[Fred von den Berg]

Halfway through book 3 of A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin (there are 10 books in German). Also found a volume of collected stories from the New Yorker columnist Maeve Brennan in one of my favoured bookshops this weekend and have read one or two: very nice with a cup of coffee.

 

[snowbear]

I'm getting ready to geek it up a bit. I got this gem for free at a conference back in March.

 

[table1349]

Done with Crazy Horse and Custer, good book but slow in some areas. About 1/3rd of the way through with The Gestapo by Frank McDonough. Well researched and interesting book that dispels a lot of the myths about the Gestapo. That's not to say they were an bunch of great guys, they definitely weren't. They however were not like the stereotypical depiction of them in movies and on TV.

 

[Boy_Cringe]

Now i am reading The Magic Mountain from Thomas Mann.

 

[KmH]

The Story of Earth
The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet - Robert M. Hazen

Hazen is an American mineralogist and astrobiology research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University. Hazen is also the Executive Director of the Deep Carbon Observatory.

 

[table1349]

Finished The Gestapo by Frank McDonough. Interesting book that shoots down many of the myths of the Gestapo. They were in no way nice people, but their actual makeup was quite different than most people think.

I then read Hitlers Last Secretary by Traudl Junge. Finished it. Interesting read based on the Diary of Traudal Junge, one of Hitlers secretaries during the war years and was there to the end in the bunker.

Just started Eichmand before Jerusalem by Bettina Stangneth.

 

[KmH]

Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
My Quest For The Ultimate Nature Of Reality

Max writes really well. He explains Quantum Mechanics principles in an easy to understand way.

On deck:
Life On The Edge - Johnjoe McFadden & Jim Khalili
The Coming Of Age of Quantum Biology