May 2013

Noam: the double helix (new annotated edition).

Noam, you asked for non-fiction history of science, and this is the mother of them. The real story of the discovery of DNA structure, by 2 young researchers, in Cambridge. This is how real science used to bE done before anyone really knew anything and there were huge gaps in our knowledge. I think there  is an essay by Aaron Klug in this edition, about the role of Rosalind Franklin.

Yoni: Master and Commander

Well, you knew we would get there eventually if you like this one the box set will have to wait for your birthday! These books kept me mesmerized for a whole year, I could not put them down. I will probably reread them all. They are without a doubt the best historically accurate  adventure fiction ever written. I am not the only one who thinks this either, half the most famous current authors think so as well.

"Patrick O'Brian's acclaimed Aubrey/Maturin series of historical novels has been described as "a masterpiece" (David Mamet, New York Times), "addictively readable" (Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune), and "the best historical novels ever written" (Richard Snow, New York Times Book Review), which "should have been on those lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century" (George Will)."

April:
Noam- why e=mc2 and does anybody care
Brian Cox
This guy is great, he frequently does a BBC radio show and is hilarious, and he works at CERN. Which in itself is rather remarkable. This is a great book which I honk that you will really enjoy.

Yoni: the hare with amber eyes
I first heard this guy, who is a famous potter, as a podcast from Jewish book week. This is his family story, partly about the very rich Jews of Vienna, partly about the holocaust but it is really a great story.

March

Noam, Berlin Noir:

The Bernie Gunther Trilogy by Philip Kerr
It is 1936 and we are in Nazi era Berlin, the olympic games are about to start, the Jewish population is waking up to a new reality.  Detective fiction at its very best...
The trilogy spans the war years and gives a grimy and bleak picture of life in wartime Berlin for ordinary people.  These are wonderful books, it took the author, Philip Kerr, another 14 years before he wrote the next one in the series. I read them a few years ago, loved the dark picture as he paints the struggle of an otherwise decent detective.



Yoni
Going Postal:

No explanations needed: There is a new TV series on Amazon prime for 9.90, read the books first. Discworld is a wonderful place.

February 2013

Yonatan:
Dissolution: J. Sansom
This book spent a long time on my wish list, several years in fact. It was a real revelation when I got around to reading it. It is a book of a genre which I am sure has existed for years but which I have only recently discovered, historically accurate fiction. This is a detective story set in Tudor England. The protagonist is a hunchbacked lawyer and it involves a number of historical figures and incidents. Later in the series there is even a fleeting Jewish interest. When you finish the first you will ask for the rest.

Noam:
The mind body problem: Rebecca Goldstein

I know you enjoyed the Boltzmann book so I thought you might enjoy this which is a philosophy book wrapped in a novel. Indeed a Jewish philosophy book in a novel. The author is a Professor of philosophy and the daughter of a Rabbi. She has written a book about Spinoza which you might like to read later. The title is a clue that yopu are about to hear a discussion of Descarte's philosophy that there is a distinction between body and mind, something that materialists like me don't really accept.
I throughly enjoyed this and I am sure you will as well.

January 2013

I had originally discussed this concept with Yoni, who asked me to pick fiction over non-fiction. On his recent visit home, Noam expressed an interest in popular science reading..

Noam:
The mold on Dr. Florey's coat.
The history of the discovery of Penicillin and its later development has long been an interest of mine. It is a truly fascinating story because the well known version is clearly a fabrication and the real workers, for the most part, went unrewarded while Fleming the great showman, was lauded throughout the world.  Others, before Fleming had noticed the effects of certain molds on bacteria and Flemings original paper does describe this effect in some detail but clearly the chemistry was too much for him. There is no doubt he was a great microbiologist, he had after all discovered lysozyme earlier but the amount of adulation poured on hime was out of all proportion to his single paper with an observation which had already been made by Lister and others. /rant

This book describes the real work, isolating the strains which produced the most antibiotic, purification and scale-up to mass production told in an extremely entertaining way.


Yonatan:

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Gosh.
I told you that there would be a lot of historical fiction:-
It is the eve of the opium wars and a strange collection of people are washed ashore after their ship sinks. Not only are the characters well drawn but there is a wealth of information about the true heart of darkness of the Great British Empire.
I just happened upon this book on a display at the central library and loved it. There is a sequel which is every bit as good.


Enjoy...

December's Books:

Yonatan:

Intuition: 

Allegra Goodman.

A great tale of academic dishonesty in a Harvard lab, which takes place just about the time we lived in Boston.

This is a great novel by a truly great novelist. Apparently it is a rather thinly disguised account of a true case concerning David Baltimore but I  can't comment on that. The story is quite believable and the interaction of all the characters is close to life. I know you don't remember but when I was at HMS I really felt that people did not make eye contact in case you stole their ideas out of their brains. I never worked on anything this critical and was never tempted by raw ambition to fake anything. Honestly if it is such important work the chances of someone trying to repeat your experiments is so high that exposure is inevitable.

Noam:

Sharpe's Tiger

Bernard  Cornwall

I thought you could do with some swashbuckling fiction. This is, in my opinion, second only to the Aubrey-Maturin series in historical fiction. We follow the adventures of rifleman Sharpe, through a number of wars ending with the Napoleonic wars in Portugal and beyond. Our first destination is India where he is posted after enlistment. This book is a little more wild than the later ones of which there are 24!(I just finished the last one). Many of these were made into PBS specials with Sean Bean  as Sharpe. This one was never dramatized, I am guessing the sets would have been too expensive. It has some similarities with the crazy adventures of the Flashman series but this one is more historically accurate and gets more down to earth. On the minus side there is less sex in Sharpe.

November's books

Noam:

The Namesake: A Novel Jhumpa Lahiri.

I have always enjoyed novels about the immigrant experience and this is an excellent example. There is a great amount of common ground between all immigrants, in particular, the Indian immigration to the United States has been one of highly educated people with clear parallels to our own experience. I know what we did seems pretty commonplace, but my life on three continents has had its challenges and it does sometimes seem like an incredible journey. 

This quote from Lahiri's  Three continents is close to my heart:

"In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his own way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy  and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no  obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon,  I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary.  I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first.  Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person  I have known, each room in which I have slept.  As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination." Amazingly appropriate isn't it! Please read the book before you see the movie, which is also good. Yonatan: Jupiter's travels.

Noam received this a few months back so I won't repeat the blurb. I thought that with your recent interest in motorcycles this might inspire you, though I don't see anyone in our family crossing the Sahara by bike anytime soon!

Noam really enjoyed this, as did both of us.