Adam

At times a 4.5

I really enjoy reading books that cover the history of mathematics whenever I want to read about things more casually beyond my more technical studies. This book definitely lands on a more technical spectrum than a rather light read. That being said, I still quite enjoyed it, but I should warn anyone venturing into this book that in order to read this material you probably should have studied Real Analysis and have an excellent working knowledge of series and sequences.

This book is quite the wild ride into the history of one of the more complicated topics for anyone studying Mathematics. Usually, even for really great students, the first course they run into that offers an incredible challenge is trying to unravel an Analysis course. Analysis, to me, is what separates a math major from other technical degrees. Mathematically, most everything else is just mathematical mechanics. The action of doing proofs is what separates out most other courses in the standard Calculus track taught in the U.S. and many other areas.

All that being said, you can see why this book can be a somewhat challenging read. However, the historical presentation of these extremely challenging topics throughout the 1800's is quite wonderful. The real journey starts as far back into the 1700's and he discusses the early inceptions of Calculus, more specifically with Leibniz and Bernoulli, since they seem to have been more interested in the philosophical workings rather than people like Newton. This brings in a lot of the other founders of deep concepts in analysis like Cauchy, Cantor, Reiemann, and the master of Analysis Weierstrass himself! If you take a course on Real Analysis it feels like Weierstrass did a huge portion of the material, and he really did, but there were quite a few others involved throughout history. While the name Bolzano does show up in today's texts, I was surprised to read about how involved he was in locking down a lot of the framework and how much he had figured out on his own.

One thing that should be mentioned is that Spalt painstakingly translated the old mathematics and recast it into a modern form for us to read. I highly appreciate this, because the standard notation we use today was completely different in a bygone age. It makes it very hard to read mathematics, so Spalt re-casting it is highly appreciated.

This book dives into the masters trying to puzzle out concepts of convergence and what to really do about irrational numbers within the number field. It turns out trying to lock down how these numbers worked was a massive challenge which took a very long time to really lock down in the realms of mathematics. It does go into detail as to how perplexing these mathematical objects were to these first rate mathematicians, which was one of the most enjoyable parts of the book.

From there Spalt goes into details on how they proceeded to construct the real numbers. Prior to this book there were two well known constructions from Cantor and Dedekind, although we find out that Dedekind really streamlined an idea proposed by others. But the real amazing story is that we get a new construction from Weierstrass that had been lost to history for nearly a century. It was unearthed in one of his students old notebooks, however, back then Weierstrass' construction was heavily misunderstood. Spalt attempts to present Weierstrass' ideas and I'm not sure I walked away fully understanding the construction. Alas, it maybe have been too ambitious to include all of this, so I think I found it hard to follow.

In the end there's a lot to digest in this little book, but it is a fascinating read for a fan of mathematical history. Especially someone that doesn't want to read archaic notation, but still wants to get a taste of what the masters struggled with in the past.

After reading through the last novel, I was pretty excited to start this one, because it seemed like Braun was hitting good momentum in the story telling. By the end of this book, I was shocked by what had occurred and I'm not sure what will happen as a result of the changes she made here... it was almost an attempt to send Qwill back to the life he had before, but not really.

Qwill is still living in the quaint mining town of Pickax and a lot of the characters we met in the last novel are returning in this one. This story centers more around the Picayune newspaper and some conspiracies involving the history of that papers sordid past. When Juniors father, the owner of the Picayune, suddenly dies in a car accident suspicions are aroused. Especially since Juniors mother makes rash decisions to sell everything immediately. Koko starts leaving clues about solving the mystery by pulling volumes of Shakespeare off the huge bookshelf in the library. I think one of the reasons this book was more “okay” than really fun is that I felt like the antics of the cats took a bit more of a back seat on this one. Sure they were still involved and helping out, as cats do, but there was a lot more of Qwill doing this and that around town. It felt a lot more similar to one of the earlier novels that was like this, though I forget exactly which one.

The interesting part is that throughout the book there weren't really that many suspicious characters, nor did one think of any foul play. So, when we get to the end, it's not entirely surprising on the “who done it” front, but it's surprising that there were no suspicions of anything. Braun does introduce a couple mysterious threads in other people lives to throw us off the trail through and wonder if they have anything to do with main mystery. I actually rather liked this, because it kept me guessing. Although, it is astounding how many just suddenly die in her novels for various reasons.

Things between Ms. Cobb and Herb Hackpole go much further than I thought they would. Hackpole is such an unlikable fellow that it's amazing to me that Ms. Cobb would go for him. In the end we are left feeling quite sorry for Ms. Cobb and this is where I wonder what she will do in the next novel.

Qwill's love life returns to the form of all the other novels. Keeping up that Bond-esque feel of the prior stories. I actually quite liked the Melinda character, so I was sad to see her go and I'm not sure the other character is as fun. Penny the librarian is nice, but we actually didn't spend all that much time with her in the novel, so we don't know too much about her in reality.

The major change that happened at the end is that the mansion was destroyed. I was kind of surprised she had this happen at all. Or have it happen so soon. We only got two books out of this location and it seemed to happen fast. I will be sad to see it go, because I really enjoyed the way the cats ran around the mansion and got up to all kinds of mischief. Now, I don't know what's going to happen. It seems like she needs Qwill to keep on moving around to bring the cats to new locations to solve other mysteries. Which is fine, I just liked the mansion with all it's books and so on.

In the end, it's another quick read. I'll keep on reading these even if some novels are better than others. It was still a fun book overall and she sort of sets up for the return of Arch Riker by the end and I'm looking forward to that. I think Arch is a fun guy when he and Qwill get together in these stories, so we'll see what happens next!

Might hover closer to a 3.5I've been trying to read all the BattleTech books in order and review them as I go and I feel we've finally come out of the main block of story that the majority of fans seem to fondly remember. “Main Event” takes place after the Clan Invasion and after the Battle of Tukayyid. In this story we follow MechWarrior Jeremiah Rose on his quest to form a new mercenary unit, which eventually becomes known as the Black Thorns. For those who play the game, there is actually a game module written after this novel called [b:The Black Thorns: A Battle Tech Scenario Pack 3317459 The Black Thorns A Battle Tech Scenario Pack James D. Long https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1538035734l/3317459.SX50.jpg 3355165], which is also written by Long. In this scenario pack you can play through notable missions where The Black Thorns participated.James Long is also a new author to the BattleTech universe, so I had no prior opinion on his writing, this is also the only book I've ever read by him and for the most part it was a pretty good book. It does have one major flaw, but I'll get into that later. In his creation of Jeremiah Rose, I thought one of the more fascinating aspects was the fact that he was an ex-ComStar fighter who actually fought the Clans on Tukayyid. For whatever reason, he is a bit of a Mary Sue character, but also isn't particularly likeable. That fact alone somewhat makes the book a bit hard to read through, even though the overall story is actually quite good and I thought very entertaining. The problem with rose is that he is ridiculously arrogant and overconfident, he puts himself in situations where he needs to play politics, then refuses to play politics because his ideals are so “perfect,” which naturally gets him into trouble.One of the strangest parts of this book is that on the front cover the advertisement makes it sound like this is going to be a book about Solaris VII, but it very much is not. The cover says “Welcome to Solaris VII, where war is a business, and life is a game.” The game world is in this novel, but only briefly. Actually, one of the reasons I enjoyed the book was because we got to go to a decent amount of areas in the BattleTech universe while Rose sought out new recruits. The novel actually starts with Rose returning to his homeland on Northwind. There he recruits his sister to help build his mercenary group. From there Rose has the problem that he doesn't actually have a ‘Mech, so his overconfidence brings him to Solaris VII, where he figures he can win one. In this course he ends up being correct, but the journey to that being true was far more fraught with danger than he ever anticipated. There he recruits a couple more fighters with ‘Mechs to join his group.From there we travel to Outreach, the mercenary capital run by the Wolf's Dragoons. I liked this part of the arc because we got to see what the Dragoons had setup from the perspective of someone that had to deal with them as a mercenary. Up till now just about all the novels with the Dragoons have been about them and their perspective, so it was kind of nice to view them from someone more on the outside. Outreach is where mercenaries go to recruit fighters and get contracts. Rose being new, had a bit of trouble with this, but he eventually managed to score a contract.All this goes by very fast in the beginning and the rest of the book is about the first contract. A remote world that the Federats have abandoned to its fate if the Clans decide to invade. The political interplay on this planet was extremely well done and what Rose then needs to deal with is pretty exciting. This whole part of the book was quite enjoyable.That is until we get to the major flaw... the story just kind of ends abruptly. I feel like there was a lot more to tell, but since Long was already over the 300 page count he was forced to finish the novel. Prior to this a lot of BattleTech books easily hit the 400+ page count, but now that RoC is publishing them, they suddenly all shrink to be ~300 pages only. It seemed Long had assumed he'd be allowed another 100 pages or so and that's probably what he would have need to actually wrap up this story... but then was told no. So, without even an epilogue the story literally wraps up in a single page.So, if you can get over an out of nowhere ending, then this book is actually a pretty good BattleTech book on par with the others I have read so far. If you've been a BattleTech fan up till this book, I think you'll find this just as enjoyable despite Rose being a somewhat annoying lead character. The general craft of the story is pretty well done as far as I'm concerned.

I give a fair warning to readers of this review that I usually have a bit of a bias against Dover books. While they make some old texts available again, I find most of the titles overly dense in the grand scheme of things. There are certainly some gems out there, but, personally, I find it is a sea of confusion to find the one gem that is readable in modern standards. However, despite this, I was rather excited to check out “About Vectors,” which is a recommendation I stumbled upon on The Math Sorceror's YouTube channel. Whom I find is a great resource for those interested in mathematics, especially if you feel you need some inspiration for doing math.

Now, I came at this book knowing a decent amount about vectors. However, one subject seems to have eluded me in all of my schooling and I've been looking for that hidden gem to teach myself Tensors for a while now. The school I attended seems rather phobic when it comes to breaching the topics of Differential Geometry and thus there was nothing offered, so I was very much on my own to read about this material if I wanted to learn it. However, most textbooks are not written with “self learning” in mind, which will often require more examples than a generic textbook, which relies on an instructor to fill in details or motivate students with more examples of ideas.

If your intent is to teach yourself about the nature of vectors steer clear of this book. This is not the authors intent at all and he says so within the first few pages. This book is written as a companion to learning the subject of vectors in a math class. It seems Hoffmann was rather dissatisfied with the presentation of vectors at his time writing and sought to rectify the situation with this book. He tries to motivate the reader asking questions about “what does magnitude really mean?” and other more vague descriptions. I think he does a good job presenting what types of objects can be combined versus which can't in a vector space, and he is correct, even in the modern day maths texts we don't do an exceptional job of talking about some of these nuances in the applied realms. However, I will say a good deal of his discussion centered around applied situations, which are things mathematics texts just don't care about when developing their theory. In maths we just say things like “the length of this vector is...” we don't even care what kind of vector, what forces, what displacements etc. are being discussed. We usually leave it up to the applied teachers/science teachers to hammer away at peoples notions of types and units.

That being said, I do quite prefer the modern treatment of vectors. We must remember this book was originally written in 1966, so while we refer to things like “vector u” or “vector v” he will use notation like “vector AB” or “vector BC” and the like. I find our newer notation to be far more condensed in that regard and easier to follow/read. Aside from that, his abstract overview of how vectors work is pretty good, but it truly does act as a supplement to other texts on vectors. Such that, I don't think I would have been able to read this without first knowing something about vectors at least a little bit.

One of the things I really did not like about the book is that Hoffmann spends a rather inordinate amount of time going over physics problems and the types of physics problems you can do. While I suppose this is all somewhat useful, it just seems like you could leave this to the physicists to discuss in detail. It's been nearly a decade since I've seen some of this stuff and I don't remember a good deal of it, and Hoffmann's ultra brief overview of these vector situations did not clarify anything really. He also avoids bringing up any calculus in this book, which is rather commendable, until we get to the physics parts of the book. Where, frankly, talking about the motion of these objects is really hard to understand without calculus. So, on the one hand, it is nice that you only need to know some vector algebra to do this book, but on the other... the physics can be hard to follow since there is no calculus to help make more sense of the situations.

The other part I found disappointing is really the sections on why I bought this book. In one part he discusses the possibility of creating a division of vectors. He brings up the fact that Hamilton's quaternions might do this, but then hand waves it away as being beyond the book. He shows a few examples where we can't divide, but does not tell us much about when we can or what it means. Why not just say “division of vectors is beyond the scope of this book”? The major reason I picked this up was the last chapter on Tensors. Now in this regard, I definitely learned more than I walked in with. However, I cannot say I truly understood it. A huge portion of this was spent on just trying to explain the notation as briefly as possible, which makes sense in a small book. The real problem is that Tensors are not really taught as their own stand alone thing, so I'm not sure what he's supplementing, unless there is a vectors course that was offered in the 60's when he was actively teaching that just doesn't exist anywhere anymore? I imagine at one time courses on Vector Analysis were rather common and these are still taught to a certain degree, but I notice most curriculums tend to sift the vector analysis throughout a bunch of courses rather than having a single dedicated course to the topic... and in that they may not even get to Tensors! Alas, my search for Tensors will remain in effect. I am not very interested in a brief overview on the topic. I would like to know and be able to do challenging problems, in that regard online resources are usually quite scant.

In any event, if you are interested in this book, just be aware that this book is not written as a “first book on vectors” it's written more as a “second book on vectors”. It has some interesting material, but I just feel that more modern titles will cover this and do a better job of it. So, in that regard the book feels rather dated, which, of course, it is. That was my take away at the end of the day.

3.5 at times

When Baen started advertising this new book, I was immediately intrigued and it sounded like a really fun read. So, I picked up a copy around when it was first released. Based on reader reactions, this appears to be much more Sherrer than Ringo on the author side of things. Ringo probably offered up some military ideas here and there, but the bulk of the story is not military sci-fi, so fans of Ringo might find it disappointing in that regard. The other problem some readers may face is this is written very much as a Young Adult book, but it feels like its being marketed to adults, so I get the impression the demographic target is a bit off. Not saying you can't enjoy both, I do, but when I read the original blurbs it felt like this was going to become intense military sci-fi and that just never really happened.

Now, this book really isn't a flop in my opinion, though it was a bit slow for me to get into. I'm still on the fence with the whole thing, but I think I have a more favorable opinion of the story than a negative opinion at the end of the day. The story follows Lynn Raven, a teenage girl who is your fairly stereo-typical gamer, that people think of as “gamer people” or “neets” if you want to borrow from Japan. This really comes as a coming of age story for Lynn, which is where this really has that Young Adult genre appeal. Lynn is a shy, theoretically out of shape person in real life. She hangs out with a group of other gamer nerds, that probably don't have much going for them beyond video games. They all play a popular video game called WarMonger, basically Call of Duty, only Lynn plays in secret, because sexism is a real thing out there. The friends she hangs out with don't even know she plays the game. Online Lynn has developed a persona called Larry Coughlin and with modern technology using a voice modulator she plays as a grizzled ex-commando. She is, in reality, one of the top players of the game and actually manages to make quite a bit of money doing it. Which she hides from her mom, even though Lynn has taken on the responsibility of paying the bills. When it comes to Lynn and her character development, I think Sherrer did an excellent job. I really liked Lynn throughout the entire book, so that aspect kept me reading when areas of the book were bogged down. Having a really well developed character really held the book together for me, if Lynn was extremely annoying or had some other frustrating trait, this book would have collapsed. Her faults are relatively minor, but I've read books where I've just hated the main characters because they are so utterly stupid, growing with Lynn, felt more natural and when she made stupid mistakes they were reasonable as happens with teenagers.

Lynn's life takes on a major change when she is personally contacted by the CEO of one of the largest gaming companies in the world, Tsunami Entertainment. (Weirdly, this is also the name of the gaming company in the movie Free Guy.) Anyway, he'd been following her work on WarMonger and wanted her to Beta Test a new game his company was developing, Transdimensional Hunter. Or TD Hunter for short. Naturally she said yes, but she couldn't tell her friends, because she'd have to explain why she even got beta testing access to the most popular up coming game out there. And here's where the novel starts to take a nose dive for me. There is entirely too much time spent explaining the game and how it works and the monsters you fight. Hundreds of pages devoted to this and the novel just feels about a hundred pages too long. I understand TD Hunter is a game made to be played in the real world, so Lynn is forced to exercise, but we could have fast forwarded the training montage at least a little bit and told us a few key moments. A huge chunk of the middle of the book just feels like fluff. Like the author got so into developing the “cool game” that no one will ever be able to play that she just had to tell us all about it. I can understand that, but I don't want to read a hundred pages of game mechanics. All it did was make the book feel slow at these points. This bloated the chapters to often being 20+ pages long, which was just more than they needed to be most of the time.

The novel eventually picks up again when the game is released and it is announced that a team challenge is happening and there is a huge prize attached. This forces her to talk to her friend group and deal with one of her friends, Ronnie, who insists on being team captain, even though he is not great at that job. Furthermore Ronnie doesn't really like Lynn and his sexist attitude towards her makes it hard for things to work. Lynn, overcoming these challenges she faced was an excellent read. Throw into the mix another rival between her and the popular girl, who are ex friends from before high school and it makes for a pretty interesting dynamic. I kind of understand why a major amount of time is devoted to Lynn as a solo gamer at the beginning of the book, but, for me, it really didn't pick up until she started interacting more regularly with other people in the world around her. Though, that is part of the whole “coming of age” portion of Lynn's story. Letting her Larry Coughlin side show more, because of her knowledge and confidence in gaming.

Since this is labelled as Science Fiction, I spent almost the entire novel expecting the TD monsters to be real. I kept waiting for that to happen. This book stared to read more and more like something out of Ready Player One as it went on, but it never happened. The monsters Lynn and her team fight never exist in our reality. However, allusions to strange happenings are made throughout the book, so it's pretty obvious the citizens of Earth are being trained for something about to happen and this military training is dressed up as a video game. Which is pretty standard at this point anyway. In the end we get a very tiny glimpse into the future of the oncoming war that is probably going to happen, but it's not explained and the book ends with an ominous “to be continued...“

To be honest, I'm rather on the fence as to whether or not I'm going to read the next book. For a long time when I was reading this, I had told myself I am definitely not going to read the sequel to this, because it's just not that interesting and I just can't read about more game mechanics. However, by the end of the story, I'm not as solidly decided. If I do read the follow-up, it's going to be a rather whimsical decision as I do have quite a few other books already in my possession that I'd probably find more joy in reading rather than satisfying my curiosity about what happens next in this particular world. In the end, I wouldn't say this is a must read, unfortunately.

Sometimes this might hit the 2.5 mark, but after waiting a couple days to write this review, I think I've come to the conclusion this hits more about a 2 in the grand scheme of things. I apologize ahead of time for this rather long winded review, but I had a lot of thoughts about this.

First off, I wound up picking up this book because I had watched the movie and liked it, I'll say more on the comparison later. But as with all obsessed book lovers, this sat on my shelf for years before I finally read it. I rather wish I had gotten this out of the library rather than taking up my own shelf space as I'm just going to be donating the book to goodwill at this point.

One of my primary problems with the book was that I felt like it was trying to be a modern day 1984 with it's overwhelming concern about our going down a road of a surveillance state. The one twist here was that it wasn't the government imposing the surveillance, it was a corporation, a social media company to be exact. This cautionary tale would be all well and good, if it was actually prophetic in some way shape or form, but this book was published in 2013 and by that point places like Facebook existed and were already doing a lot of the things this author was writing about. So, it really wasn't adding anything new to the conversations and it certainly didn't stand out as a “unique voice” on the topic. In that regard, the book comes off more soap boxy than a real philosophical criticism of social media culture.

This book is the story of a social media giant, The Circle, and it's growing into a huge corporate entity that becomes globally unstoppable, all in the name of “social justice,” I suppose, for lack of a better phrase. In this book we follow Mae Holland an average woman from a middle of nowhere town, who gets the chance of a life time to work for one of the biggest tech giants in the world. Sure, she'll be starting at the bottom, but that's where most people work. For reference, The Circle is the kind of company where if you blended Facebook and Google together in one giant conglomerate. The book even starts out early on talking about Monopoly hearings at the government level and considerations of breaking up these entities. However, in terms of corporate culture it feels more Google than the other social media giants. The Circle is more focused on connecting humanity in all aspects of life, through innovative ideas they believe they can make a “better” and “safer” world for everyone.

Here we join Mae on her journey into the corporate world and watch as she descends down a path of becoming an absolute corporate lackey by the end of the book. She fully believes she is becoming a better person, because of the innovations the company has been making. We, the reader, are supposed to be horrified and believe the opposite. To a great extent, it's not that I disagree with Eggers on any of his points about the horrors of this technology, it was just the way he went about telling us his opinion that just felt... I don't know... I want to say “vapid” as my description of what I walked away with. Mae is this main character that we're not really supposed to like, who makes bad decisions left and right all because she never thinks too critically about what the company is asking her to do. Some of the aspects of what goes on are just so ridiculous that you can't even imagine work getting done, such as them constantly adding new screens to her desk so she can take on more responsibilities with her entry level job a few weeks in. It's just such a painful thing to read happening, because it's so fantastical and would never happen amidst all this stuff you're supposed to believe is actually plausible.

In the end you're supposed to follow Mae into shunning her old life, alienating her parents all for a life at The Circle. The most realistic part of the whole affair was that I absolutely believe a company would setup dormitories for employees to “stay” and it is not too outlandish to see how having a convenient overnight place turns into a home. I mean, they used to have that kind of stuff for workers in the past. Not to mention all these constant events happening at the campus that you are “sort of” expected to attend, even if you go home to visit your sick father. The whole thing amounts to the concept of constant work. You are always at work, you work is home now, and you are always there. This is the part of the book that I thought was actually quite well done. The whole concept of being always at work is a massive problem in the U.S. and I'm sure it's a problem in other areas of the work. Thanks to our new technology you are always available. Employees are always reachable, they can do work at home etc. Some people out there fall into this trap, and I daresay, some actually like it and think it is a feature. But not everyone wants to become their job as their whole being. Like the dialogue with bosses in The Circle, Mae finds herself feeling like she has to make a choice about always being at work or having a life outside work and it is clearly lost on her managers why or how she could have a life away from The Circle. People who are their jobs don't understand why people would have other things to do or even maybe shop somewhere else, even though such things might be available at the job.

In any event, Mae gets guilt tripped into visiting her father more than once, despite corporate “support” for her well being. The real horror begins when The Circle reveals a new concept of transparency. It starts with starting a movement for government officials that go “transparent”. What that implies is that the government official is on camera at all times when they are at work. Every meeting is filmed, so, in theory, no shady deals will be occurring between our elected officials an anyone else. I'm sure this is an alluring idea, but it's likely not very practical. In terms of the social media users, they take this to the next level and call it going “fully transparent,” which is something Mae eventually agrees to do. What that implies is that you are on video at all times. You literally just walk around with a camera live feed for your everyday life. It's basically creating the most boring YouTube channel on Earth. By the way, their social platform at this company is called TruYou... and going fully transparent helps people see you as a fully realized person. They scan all the products you buy, make you take endless surveys etc. all so the algorithms can get better at selling you products.

In any event, now that Mae is fully transparent, she truly believes she's thinking better and becoming a better person. Her line of reasoning involves that, she is more choosy about her words and the decisions she makes because she fears public backlash if she doesn't make good choices. It affects the way she eats, what she says, what she does, everything everyday. She truly believes she is better and thus fully indebted to the company for everything they have given her. It's obvious she is suffering from the anxiety of being constantly on camera, but she tries very hard to ignore this aspect of her new life, but we the reader know something is off. She doesn't really understand why not everyone wants to be filmed either, so anytime she has an encounter with people that are not interested in this, she is shocked that they do not want to make the world a better place. Her viewers are supportive and often call any detractor terrible names... as people are wont to do online now.

This leads me to her friend Mercer, an ex-boyfriend from high school. Based on his opinions and existence in the book, I suspect Eggers sees himself as Mercer. At least, every time Mercer tried to talk to Mae about his concerns with the rise of these social media powers and Mae's full interest in basically becoming an “influencer” she never listens. So, while he's trying to make a point, she just doesn't listen, or ignores his point altogether. This is one of the reasons book felt a lot more like a soap box being stood upon... it felt like it wasn't enough to watch Mae descend into this horrible world, we needed Eggers to make it clear why it was wrong. It comes to a head when we realize that the world being created by The Circle is one in which people like Mercer cannot really exist comfortably. Not even her parents can really exist there, but she's so convinced that the corporate mandate is correct that she just thinks they need more social media in their lives so they can understand how many people would support them.

The book comes to a head at the end, and Mae is given an opportunity by a high ranking individual to help slow things down. Despite the relationship these two offered, Mae soundly rejects the offer. I won't spoil the details, but the ending of the whole affair is a rather dark ending. I will say, I was surprised at the ending, but that's only because I saw the movie. So, in the end she chooses life at The Circle and to help them build the world they dream of, fully transparent for all citizens of the world. I don't disagree with Eggers, the notion is quite horrifying. The concept that humans do not need private thoughts, ever, is wild. It's sort of that Brave New World concept shining through.

There were a couple other aspects of the book I found annoying. All of her sexual encounters were annoying. Granted the ones with Francis were supposed to be. He's supposed to be a fool and Mae is supposed to be a fool for carrying on with him. Her others were also really ridiculous. I don't know if I would say they're totally unrealistic, but they were stupid and having something else happen would have been far more meaningful to the story.

I have two more extremely minor nit picks. Yeah, they're going to be lame, but man, it was annoying. There are NO CHAPTERS. It's just this giant long winded story with nothing breaking things up until you get to a double spaced section which often denoted a scene change.... hello... chapters? After a few hundred pages into the novel suddenly I get to a page that says “Book II”... but there was never a page that said “Book I,” whoever edited/designed this thing did a terrible job. Furthermore, there is a “Book III,” but its like ten pages long. Why even break it up at that point? Ridiculous. Just make chapters. The editing and design are just terrible, if they left it like that at Eggers insistence he needs to rethink his approach to novels.

How does this stack up against the movie? Well, I know this is going to be utter blasphemy in the realm of book readers, but this is one of the extremely few instances where I think the movie was better. It has nothing to do with the fact they changed it from a dark ending to a happy ending. I can absolutely appreciate a dark ending, especially one with real power behind it. But, this just never felt like that. The end just kind of happened in the novel and when it seemed like someone might fight for something, it just never went anywhere. It just ended and the world got worse and we are all supposed to feel bad about it. It was rather anticlimactic, to be honest, because it didn't change anything about how the story was setup. The Circle set out to do this thing and then it, you know, did the thing and now everyone in the book lives there. Not much was done about the whole affair. Whereas, in the movie, with Emma Watson bringing Mae to life, we actually sympathized with her more. She felt more human and there was real conflict until she makes an entirely different decision at the end. Tom Hanks did a brilliant job playing Eamon Bailey and I think he was true to form with how he was written in the book. The movie stream lines everything and takes out the meaningless sexual encounters (I'm not against sexual encounters, but they just felt like time wasters in this book). In the end I think the movie did a better job of portraying Eggers' overall point and his concerns about mob rule via social media platforms. Like I said, I don't really disagree with his overall point, his execution of his thoughts was just a little late to the party and then to write a book around a character we're not really supposed to like... just felt like it didn't go anywhere. I'm shocked to see this even has a sequel, I'm curious, but honestly, I don't think I'd be able to bring myself to read the thing.

As with [b:Finna 44081573 Finna (LitenVerse, #1) Nino Cipri https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1563304090l/44081573.SY75.jpg 68548236] this sequel is just as fun as the first to read. It seemed to me like “Finna” would just be one off novella, but “Defekt” fleshes out the world of this nightmare Ikea a little bit more. The characters we met in the first book are largely absent from this tale, because theirs is already done, so this story focuses on an employee we met in the first book, Derek. Cipri does an awesome job weaving the stories together and we find out what happened to Derek on his day off. Remember, the reason our first two protagonists had to go on the rescue mission is because Derek called out sick!After meeting the Derek drones in the first book, I sort of thought that would be where this novel went. Since this was Derek's story, I suspected it would overlap with the first book and maybe he was one of the drones from the parallel universe, so I was truly surprised when that turned out not to be the case. While I can't claim this tale was anything truly original, Cipri did manage to weave together a lot of influences and tell the tale in a somewhat unexpected way, which is all the more reason I found it such a fun story. When you hit on fairly standard themes, but switch around the outcomes it really does make for a more unpredictable story. Not to mention, throwing in a bit of the anti-corporate veneer makes it all the more wonderful.This tale is similar to the first in the sense that it is yet another story of employees trapped in impossible situations that corporate believes makes the most sense. Anyone that has worked for a large corporation knows that there is this wildly huge gap from what corporate administrators think something is like versus the people who are actually doing the task required of them. I don't know why this is so prevalent in all forms of corporate bureaucracy, but it just is.When Derek comes back from his sick day, he finds himself being interrogated by a regional manager of sorts. His immediate report, Tricia, is clearly not happy about this, but Tricia was never really happy about anything in the first book either. Most people have worked for that one odious manager whose life is so miserable that they can't help but put it on everyone else around them as they are further consumed by the negativity of their own existence. In any event, Derek finds himself being asked to help out on a special inventory overnight. Overnight inventory is a common thing for large stores to do... but this is an extra special inventory and boy will it change the course of Derek's life forever. I won't get into any details, but it is quite an interesting ride and it is not at all what I expected this book to be like.If you enjoyed Finna then I can guarantee you'll enjoy Defekt. I wonder, at this point, if Cipri will finally be able to escape the maze of LitenVarld stores, since Finna was intended to be a one off. However, I may not complain if Cipri decides to write us another tale within this universe, but it might be a good idea to end on a high note like this. Only time will tell though.

This is the second installment in the Magic: The Gathering “universe”. This is also the first in a longer form series going after the traditional three book format that is extremely common in Fantasy novels since the time of Lord of the Rings. So, this is definitely a little bit different than the first book “Arena,” which is a one off.

I'm starting to run into a really strange common theme between the two novels though. One of the main parts is just generally how destructive and uncaring wizards are about the lives of anyone and anyone except their own interests in gaining power. Or killing/beating other wizards. Let's be honest here... when you play MtG, YOU are the wizard. So, all these authors are basically saying is that you're an uncaring destructive force that will kill any bystander for the sake of a duel with your deck of cards. Furthermore, the creatures you summon are literally your slaves. It's not like you can play as other characters in the card game like you can in an RPG, so it's kind of, just weird, to cast their players in this light. It's almost like they generally had no idea what they were implying when they wrote these stories and commissioned the authors to “write a book about wizards, also look at the card names so you can sift the names into the story a little bit.” Once the game gets more into writing it's own narrative with the block format, I wonder if the novels start to take on a very different feel. I rather welcome that change in the story format, but I'll trudge through these early novels until I get there, because there doesn't seem to be that many of them.

“Whispering Woods” is the story of a ridiculously unrealistic commoner from a small village with a bad knee, Gull. His profession is woodcutting for the village, so he's good with an axe. However, as some other reviewers have pointed out this gets pushed to a rather ridiculous level. Gull goes on throughout the book to defeat multiple armies of people, defeat trained body guards, fight off lions and all kinds of other insane stuff. This isn't to say I didn't like the character Gull, he was just so overwhelmingly fantastical that it just got to be too much. It would have made way more sense if he had had some level of combat training at the bare minimum.

In any event the story opens with how idyllic Gull's life is taking care of his “simple” sister in the small village. There's a girl there he likes and everything is generally quite wonderful. Then a wizard duel breaks out and basically destroys everything in Gull's world except his sister. Gull vows to kill all wizards as a result, but then one of the fighters shows up and says how not all wizards are like that and offers Gull a job as a freighter for his wagon train.

Along his travels we learn about this wizard Towser a little bit, least of which is the fact that he has a harem dancing girls enslaved to him for his pleasure. However, Gull gets close to one of them, Lily. A young girl, who knows how young compared to Gull, for we never know. In any event the Lily arc of the story and their budding relationship wasn't too bad, except there were a couple moments where it seemed Gull didn't even consider her well being. The other problem is that far too often it turned into one of those cliche “damsel in distress” scenarios, where Lily was constantly in danger, like more than is reasonable. Furthermore, once they showed her not to be a helpless beauty, she was just as forgotten. There's a huge battle at the end and we find something out about her that's very special, but then she just disappears from the pages... I really don't understand why. She could have been a much more important character, but Emery just doesn't. Instead it's like some reason to have her talk about whoring and how Gull will need to get over that if he “really loves her”. It was a really silly moralistic conflict and rather unnecessary.

The use of the cards throughout the story was somewhat interesting, but instead of just spells, they are uttered as various words of surprise. At one point Gull exclaims “Kormus Bells” when he's surprised about something. It's rather goofy in the end. One of the other things that was held over from the “Arena” novel is the lack of being very clear what magic some of the wizards are using. For example, Towser was summoning creatures from Blue and Red a lot, but then all of a sudden he uses Black Magic at one point. In the original card design a lot of players were really making mono color decks and it wasn't until a few years in that multi-color decks were much more commonly used, even in the rule books back in the day. It's as if the authors writing these stories have no idea how the game really works. The mechanism Emery brings up is that the wizard just has to touch a creature in order to enslave it. In the end the whole interpretation of the way the game interfaced with the story just felt kind of wrong or as if the author didn't really “get” the card game.

In the end, the novel wasn't too bad. I found it rather enjoyable as it took off and got over half way through. At that point the author did a good enough job to get me vested in the characters. The best story arc was the one between Gull and the guard Kem. The way that tale was weaved was really quite good and that's why this got a bit of a bump. I would have probably kept it at a 2, whereas the novel is probably a 2.5 in the end given all the problems.

I almost want to bump this to 4 stars, because of the recent string of comics from the Cyberpunk 2077 series... this one was actually pretty good as far as story goes. However, for a hardcover release... I just don't think it's hitting that 4 star mark where I think I got my money's worth out of this.It's strange, the Cyberpunk setting, in general, is a setting I truly enjoy. I think I keep coming at these comic books, because I'm hoping to get that satisfaction like I did with the games story line. I don't have hopes of hitting William Gibson levels of satisfaction, but you know, something cool in a cyberpunk setting. However, a lot of the time I think I walk away from these comics feeling something is always lacking. They've just never been able to reclaim the quality the of [b:Cyberpunk 2077, Vol. 1: Trauma Team 54270503 Cyberpunk 2077, Vol. 1 Trauma Team Cullen Bunn https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1600742227l/54270503.SY75.jpg 84688495]. The art has definitely been on somewhat of downward spiral, which is a real shame because once the game sorted itself out, it was beautiful. But these comic books are just not on par. I'm not saying I want crazy realistic digital art, but the art choices being made in these comics seem like they are very, I don't know, haphazard. The glitz and the tech are just faded into the background with a focus on poorly drawn human figures. I feel like Dark Horse or CD Projekt Red should be taking a hard look at what Titan Comics has been publishing with the Blade Runner series and ask themselves why they can't achieve such quality? Titan Comics is a smaller shop than Dark Horse and it makes no sense to me how Blade Runner repeatedly knocks the cyberpunk genre out of the park, while the actual Cyberpunk setting is just so blasé.I almost wish they would talk to someone over at R. Talsorian games, or hell, someone that plays even the original RPG and have them write stories. These short stories are just so unsatisfying at the end of the day and I wish they would stop making them. This is their third attempt, admittedly one of the better ones, but it's still lacking. I feel like they're going after a concept of “life changes fast in Night City, one day you're there and another you could be gone!” But does that really make for compelling short stories? It doesn't seem so in this case. They need to make some level of an action comic, so they're going to sacrifice real character development, but they also want to have some sort of a “moral” aspect to the story or whatever, so they're going to sacrifice some of the action... all we wind up with is a product that doesn't feel very full. “Big City Dreams” is a quick side story about two partners in crime that are trying to up their game. One partner, Ragazza, is not really as interested in changing. However, Tasha's ambitions wind up dragging him along. After doing some heavier work, which starts our comic off mid police chase, we find out they are gathering bodies to sell to a ripper doc for “parts”. While they escaped the police, Ragazza is having second thoughts, meanwhile Tasha is feeding off the challenge and excitement. Interwoven into this is the story of a desperate family that sold their life in the form of brain dance recordings and Ragazza gets caught up in their saga. It's a calming lifestyle on a farm, which is the polar opposite of that found in Night City, it makes Ragazza question where he is in his life and if Tasha is really steering them in the right direction. He becomes so obsessed he tries to track down the family, only to find out that their lives outcome was never truly wonderful and that his life's outcome isn't either. Once again, live fast, die fast. There was almost an attempt at deeper development, but there just isn't enough pages.I don't know, in some ways I want to stop buying these comics, but I do like the setting. I just don't know, really, how they could make this work. Titan Comics publishes something like 12 issue series with Blade Runner and it works extremely well. But, then again, they have great writers working on their books. If Dark Horse and CD Projekt Red could hook up with the right writer, a long form Cyberpunk 2077 comic could be amazing, especially if you put stunning art into the comic. None of this more abstract deformed looking kind of art... which is fine in small doses, but for a long story, I'd want to see something more. But if they have a bad story, it could be a real 12 issue slog, so I doubt they will ever take such a risk. I'm just saying, this series could be great if they wanted it to be, but it just feels like sort of fast cash grabs with the way a lot of these stories are laid out. At the end of the day, maybe these are improving. “Big City Dreams” is certainly better than [b:Cyberpunk 2077: Where's Johnny 57164985 Cyberpunk 2077 Where's Johnny Bartosz Sztybor https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1623669145l/57164985.SY75.jpg 86742941] .

Serge Lang is a very well known mathematician, if you study math you have probably heard of him... if you study Number Theory specifically, you most certainly have. He wrote a series of text books for Springer-Verlag that are fairly well known in the mathematics community. You can often find them on the bookshelves in a fair amount of offices. Beyond his abilities in mathematics is also known for being an excellent lecturer of the craft. For that reason it comes as no surprised when the Palais de la Decouverte in Paris wanted to offer some lectures in mathematics to a lay crowd Serge Lang was asked to speak.Lang tasked himself with the challenge of trying to explain and give other people the sense of what a mathematician does, or at least what types of problems they can think about. In the 1980's he gave three talks, one per year. So, it was, naturally, not always the same crowd. However, the audience participation was about the same each time he gave a talk, which was rather fun. This book is the transcript of the lecture and the exchange between Lang and his audience.Since this was a “Saturday afternoon crowd,” as Lang kept reminding us, which I found quite comical eventually, he was faced with the challenge of speaking in front of people that may merely have a passing interest in mathematics and nothing more. They, no doubt, came from varied backgrounds and some may never do much math beyond these talks. Quite a challenge for any professional in their field, but I rather love Lang's strategy as he approached this task. The only way to really, truly, see mathematics for what it really is, is to do mathematics. Mathematics is not really a spectator sport, despite how many people would like it to be just that. So, Lang decided to involve the audience in the mathematics he was doing, calling out for participation. He announces that mathematicians participating is cheating! Mathematicians are seriously bad listeners and a few of them piped up breaking his rules.Since Lang is a number theorist it came as no surprise that he came up with a talk about prime numbers. One of the things that makes his talks rather fascinating is he tries very hard to start his audience with material they either have seen somewhere or at the very least can figure it out relatively easily. He goes over very well the challenges mathematicians face in trying to find these numbers. He tries not to get overly abstract, for fear of losing his audience, but he does present them with the major formulas and results so far. It is rather difficult to understand once he starts wading into the territory where mathematicians (at the time) have no answer. In my case, I did not study much number theory, so I am an apt pupil for his talk to some degree. I found the sections where he goes for unsolved math a bit difficult, probably because the transcript makes it a bit more challenging, I do wonder if the lecture would have been easier to watch in the moment. Sadly, I probably would have asked too many questions about how things are defined and he would have told me we are getting to specific for the audience to follow.The second talk was on Diophantine equations. This was a more fascinating talk to read about, probably because I found the math more interesting. Once again, towards the end when he tries to wade into the unsolvable territory, his need to stay away from technicalities sort of mars the readers understanding of what he is driving at. However, up until that happens, it is a wonderful read. One of the things that I appreciated in these talks was that he tried to share why he found mathematics beautiful. Why he found joy in working on and he tried to share that joy through interesting questions. He tried to start with smaller ideas that grow into big problems to show the audience why he would bother to spend time thinking about such things.The first two talks were only an hour long, followed by a brief question and answer period. In the second talk chunk of this was cut out because he had a conversation with an audience member about the state of mathematics education and I truly wish they had left that exchange in. He, like me, had commented about looking at a recent high school text and being infuriated by it. I tend to feel a similar way about the majority of text books that are out there. Many of them try to display facts or try to make math “ultra concrete” with applications question, or “make math fun,” but all these books sorely miss the point. Many of them barely bother to even list the rules we are working with or give insight or even a slight inkling to the structure of mathematics. And even if they present the rules, they scarcely ever tie it all together at the end showing us the broader picture for what we have built, a sorely missed opportunity.The last talk, which I think he had planned to be the last, because he was running out of lay topics that turn into unsolved problems that don't rely on intense technical work, was about geometry. Now, this is not his field, so I went in with a little bit of trepidation. He wanted to talk about a recent result that had been worked on in the year prior to his talk. Now, geometry is something I have a bit more experience with, however, I have not run into some of the things he talks about here. This is a major deficiency in my education at this time, which I hope to rectify. His talk started off strong as he tried to give an audience of the idea of dimension and what it means for a set to be open or closed and how this relates to something like a sphere with a boundary versus a sphere without a boundary and what that “means”. He did pretty good discussing equivalences of geometric objects and cutting and deforming. The book actually does a wonderful job of including diagrams. They took two breaks in this long sequence of a lecture and each time more people left, but the third our there were still about a hundred people left out of the 250+ starting. Now, this third hour is where he fell victim to trying to discuss very complex matters that are very hard to understand, in my opinion, if you try to avoid technicalities. I was probably left with a fair amount of questions after his discussion of the hyperbolic metric, because there was much more I wanted to know about it and he probably would not have been able to say anything without writing down and deriving certain formulas.He tried to give a decent sense of what topology and differential geometry are trying to talk about at times. His big goal was to talk about a conjecture presented by Thurston and I still don't really know what it was about or why it was very important. So, I think in his attempt to present this very complex idea, it was too difficult to truly say simply. Now, I do know Thurston and I know Hubbard has written a book built on his ideas into a subject called Teichmuller Theory. [b:Teichmüller Theory and Applications to Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics 14992132 Teichmüller Theory and Applications to Geometry, Topology, and Dynamics John H. Hubbard https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515483160l/14992132.SY75.jpg 20646683]. This material is hardly for the faint of heart and you no doubt need an extremely strong understanding of things like Differential Geometry to even begin reading such material.In the end, I found this transcript fun to read. Lang's enthusiasm for the subject oozes off the page and he even went through and edited the transcript to include any footnotes to add further details he felt would be useful. If you are enthusiastic about mathematics in general, or if you study maths and would just like to engage a good speaker (albeit not through the spoken word), then I think you will find some merit in this little book. I wish they had preserved some Lang lectures in video form, and I don't know if any exist, but I think this would have been even more powerful to watch happen in real time. Serge Lang, I'm sure, is missed in the mathematical community, but with books like this his voice can live on and I'm glad Springer-Verlag put these books together.

Honestly, probably a strong 4.8I have done something almost no one does... I have read a maths textbook. Not only have I read a maths text, I have actually done a huge portion of the problems in the book. With regards to full disclosure, I am a professor of Mathematics, so I have definitely read this from a very different perspective compared to a student learning for the first time. However, when I was first teaching myself Calculus a little over ten years ago, this was the text I had picked up, albeit it was an old edition, the 2nd Edition to be specific. I was not formally trained in mathematics at the time, and I was opting for a rather drastic career change from working in the Financial Industry. I did not really know what I wanted to do, but I remembered having a passing interest in maths (this is in my late 20's). I was always placed in the accelerated program for mathematics when I was in High School and Elementary School, but I definitely always had a lot of trouble engaging the material during school itself. For me, it really wasn't until I was able to remove myself from the school system and read several Algebra text books and then felt quite prepared to take on Calculus. I felt I was getting quite good at Calculus after reading what I could of Stewart (most of my way through Calc II) that I decided to take a summer Calculus 1 course at a nearby college. I wanted some confirmation that, perhaps I was not too bad at the subject and to overcome some of the mathematical anxiety I experience all through high school. I receieved an A in the course, from there I quit my job and enrolled at a university to study Applied Mathematics. I greatly enjoyed the material, and while it was very difficult after a short amount of time I eventually got a my Masters in Applied Maths, then I was given a job teaching at the university I graduated from. I have been there ever since.Now, perhaps, a new chapter in my life unfolds where I feel the urge to potentially acquire a PhD, but it has been quite a long time since I have studied all aspects of Calculus. I have, for the past decade primarily been teaching some variation of Calculus 1 or Pre-Calculus, so I am rather decent with those subjects. While I remembered quite a bit from Integral and Multivariable Calculus, it has been quite some time since I have flexed that muscle and worked problems. I decided to return to an old favorite of a text and got the latest edition of this wonderful tome written by James Stewart.This 8th edition did not disappoint! I have looked through and read several other Calculus texts over the years and, to me, few can compete with Stewart's exposition. The text is masterfully written and I would say it is a solid text for self study, up to a certain point. At some point you will want to confer with an expert on the material in order to make sure you are grasping the content as intended. To me, tutors and teachers are rather essential for this. It's sometimes not enough to just sit and do mathematics in your room by yourself... to make sure you are truly understanding what has been written and make sure you are using notation correctly, having a discussion with someone trained in that field goes quite a long way! Luckily, being at a university I had a lot of people I could just ask, but not everyone will have such a luxury. Either way, do not underestimate the value of conversations in technical subjects, I find they are paramount to my understanding and to my students' understanding.If you want to do mathematics the right way, you need to put pen to paper, this is unavoidable. It is not enough to read these texts like a novel, as any mathematician will tell you. You, truly, can only learn it by doing it and I don't really care how much of a genius someone is, they are still human and will need to do this at some point. One of the complaints one of my colleagues had about the text was that the problem sets in Stewart were too easy, so that was one of the major justifications for using Thomas, despite the exposition being sub par in my opinion. I am happy to report that the 8th Edition seems to be rather different from the 2nd edition that I remember working in. The 8th Edition has definitely cranked up the difficulty level on the problem sets, in some ways this was detrimental to later sections of the text. (It's the one criticism I have of the text, but I will get into that later). This increased challenge factor to the problems has truly launched this book into the flagship Calculus book category for me.For the most part the ordering of the topics is quite well done. The first part of the book sort of runs through a crash course in Pre-Calculus topics, which is nice if you were good at Pre-Calc and want a refresher. I do not recommedn starting with this book, though. If you have an okay Algebra background, but a poor Pre-Calculus background, you will have a very hard time getting through Stewart. Pre-Calculus books are notoriously horribly written, the ordering, to me, is often atrocious and confusing. Important geometric motivations that should be used throughout the course are taught halfway through etc. It's all just backwards and it's no wonder I had a hard time in Pre-Calc and couldn't follow the material well. However, a real gem my university is using now is [b:Precalculus 28765265 Precalculus Julie Miller https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1586714711l/28765265.SX50.jpg 48956873]. After having read a decent portion of this book's content, I think it is very well written. I think this book would be the best preparation for tackling something like Stewart. There are portions of this book I would make harder and a few choice pieces I would add to the content, but overall it is good preparation.The core criticism I will level at Stewart is a couple missed opportunities in my opinion. I think they were very concerned about how long the book already was, but, in my opinion, when books are this long, what's 100 more pages? Since Stewart has passed away, sadly, it would probably be nearly impossible to add meaningful content in his style. In any event, one thing that is easily rectified is putting the Differential Equations (DE) chapters into one chapter. I feel like Stewart wrote a chapter about Differential Equations and then the publisher decided to split it up, but, truly, the content he wrote about makes the most sense after Integral Calculus. But, strangely, half of the DE chapter is after the chapter on Vector Calculus. You don't even solve any of the problems with Multivariable Calculus, so what is this even doing at the end? It's far more cohesive and has better flow if you just make one differential equations chapter.That being said, his DE chapter is very well done, but it starts to waver a little bit when we get to Variation of Parameters and Series Solutions of ODE's. I like having this content in here and I think the problems are fascinating and I truly think the problem sets are good, but these problems assume quite a bit of mathematical maturity that just isn't spelled out in the text. The way you need to manipulate power series via re-indexing and studying the partial sequences, there just aren't any good examples to walk you through how complex some of the problems get. Nor is there much in the series section on re-indexing your series or just the general algebraic mechanics being used in the context of the DE questions. Getting Power Series to match so that you can use the distributive property is not always the most obvious thing based on the discussion found in this book. So, some students reading this on their own may find this as a bit of a stumbling block.So, if they put all the ODE material into a single chapter that would be wonderful. The truly missed opportunity at the end of Multivariable Calculus is that the student is equipped to study some of the lower level Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that are out there. Such as just finding characteristic equations and such would be a huge boost to the students. PDE books notoriously don't write out step by step examples, but Stewart could have put them in at this location and doing a few basic problems.In the Vector Calculus section, I think Stewart assumes a relatively high maturity level when it comes to working with Analytic Solid Geometry. While I have worked on such material, it has been quite some time. This is also where a lot of the graphical content seems to fall off. Throughout the book Stewart often provides a lot of geometric motivation for the problems and so on, but in the Vector Calc section I feel like far more maturity beyond the general Quadric Surfaces was assumed, so the transition from reading a section, looking at examples, to doing problems on your own had a bit of a steeper uptick. I think his section was decently written, but I frequently felt like something was missing.However, I have always maintained that Vector Calculus should be its own course and not even part of the standard 3-semester Calculus track most universities employ. I think the student needs a fair amount of time playing with the general geometry around Vector Fields before attempting serious calculus techniques on objects within the field. This was really the only time I felt like the problem sets somewhat got away from what was written in the sections. I felt the way the material was laid out I wanted a little bit more hand holding along the way before I was really left to my own devices.That being said, once an enterprising student has gone through this text they may be ready to tackle the likes of [b:Advanced Calculus 1928641 Advanced Calculus Wilfred Kaplan https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349011971l/1928641.SX50.jpg 1930929] or [b:Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach 26841906 Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms A Unified Approach John H. Hubbard https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1443642445l/26841906.SX50.jpg 618180]. These books aren't necessarily for the faint of heart. They are challenging books, but I found them to be well written. You may want to study Linear Algebra as a stand alone course before attempting courses with the blend of Linear and Vector Calculus. With regards to taking further upper level mathematics courses, Stewart does not adequately prepare you to jump into the likes of Real Analysis, Topology, etc. To supplement this material books covering Logic and Set Theory in more detail, along with general Proof Techniques should be looked at. [b:Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications 40878125 Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications (Discrete Structures 1, Volume 1 + 2) Kenneth H. Rosen https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1532045573l/40878125.SX50.jpg 774967] by Kenneth Rosen is considered one of the flagship books covering this content. I have read this book and I find it's material to be very well done. Once you've covered proof techniques in this fashion, perhaps you will have enough mathematical maturity to take on a course like Real Analysis. I would not recommend jumping to [b:Principles of Mathematical Analysis 1416951 Principles of Mathematical Analysis Walter Rudin https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1417558370l/1416951.SX50.jpg 283392] by Rudin right away, at least not without an expert to help walk you through it. [b:Calculus 328645 Calculus Michael Spivak https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387735275l/328645.SX50.jpg 319267] by Spivak is certainly a classic Real Analysis book, his problem sets can get quite maddening, but if you can figure them out you will have a wonderful time in that book. Spivak does assume quite a lot of mathematical maturity and I'm not sure one has that coming direct from Stewart. Best to do some more work on Proofs and Set Theory, especially Set Theoretic ideas as they apply to the Real line.In the end, I wholly endorse Stewart's Calculus. It's one of the finest introductory Calculus books ever written and it is no secret that this is considered the gold standard for a students' first experience with the wonders of Calculus. I truly can't endorse this book enough, just be aware towards the very end you may need more assistance through the problem sets than the exposition can provide. In the end, Stewart's presence in the mathematical community will surely be missed, but the legacy of his text will live on. I only wish I could have told him the story of my drastic career change and how his text strangely facilitated my success into a career I had never even considered having.

One of the graduate students at my university was tasked with helping the department with all the books we've managed to accumulate over the years. Many of the books were old and outdated maths texts that use archaic notation that modern students might find baffling, so we were looking to recycle the lot of them. However, being the book worm I am, I was assisting with what we should keep as some of the classics are certainly worth keeping around. In our searches we found a couple non-mathematics texts. This was one of them. At first I thought it might be the joint book, since this was a Springer publication, I fully thought it was going to be quite the terse read, however, I was pleasantly surprise to find that this is was more a history book of these wonderful mathematicians.

This was originally published as two separate books and here is a reprinting as a collected works. I rather think these books may have been lost to the annals of history, but for interested parties I think it is worth turning your head to these absolutely amazing stories. Constance Reid does an amazing job of telling us a story, not only of mathematical achievement, but insight into the personalities of these two men and all those around them. The stories are rife with personal anecdotes and stories of the two growing up, the people they worked with and friends they made along the way. The tragedies of major wars that struck them both and the continuance of a discipline into the future.

The first book covers the story of David Hilbert. Many students will recognize his name for Hilbert Spaces, which is a fairly common thing to run into in graduate school, if not an ambitious undergrad. However, we only learn the name, but in this book we meet the man behind them and how he was responsible for so much more. Hilbert worked in the late 1800's/early 1900's for the majority of his life. He began in Konigsberg, which has now become a Russian territory post-World War II. From here he eventually found his way to Gottingen and under the mighty Felix Klein they would create one of the most formidable mathematics institutions in all of Germany. The famous mathematicians and physicists that have crossed path with Hilbert is simply incredible. He was very good friends with Minkowski! Reid's preservation of their letters to each other in this book were some of the more wonderful portions. Hilbert worked on a couple major projects that would influence the rest of math for the coming century. The first was to work with quite a few other big names out there to get mathematics on much more solid footing. Doing Set Theoretic constructions, tackling criticism from Russell and the like, but he was primarily focused on the realms of analysis and shoring up those areas. He also took an interest in physics, I wonder if partly due to Minkowski, who was, unhappily, not at Gottingen with Hilbert. Although, he eventually found his way there, but by then he had been working in the realms of mathematical physics for quite some time. Hilbert sought to bridge the gaps between the two disciplines as much as possible, he may have done this rather well, especially with the help of Courant. Together they wrote a joint book on the subject taking the academic world by storm.

One of the more fascinating parts of the book, which made this into quite the page turner is that Reid told the stories through the dates of their lives. In the early 1900's we all know what was eventually coming... World War I. I was surprised to see that World War I was not that disruptive to the life of Hilbert. Naturally student enrollment went down and it became difficult to purchase certain things, but all in all the mathematics continued to flow. The great depression had similar issues, of course.

The years kept on moving and the next big event, which, I imagined would be the most disruptive was the oncoming of the Nazi party in the 1930's. This would, sadly, be a death sentence for Gottingen and many other institutions around Germany. Hilbert, being quite old at this point, was unlikely to bother leaving the country at this point. He tried to continue teaching, but found it odious so retired instead of deal with the rules of the regime. He was once asked by a higher up how mathematics was now that the “Jewish influence” was gone. His response was that “Mathematics is no longer done there.” Due to the policies enacted by Nazi Germany it simply gutted their faculty. Some of their most prodigious professors were Jewish and either escaped, with luck, or were simply fired. Richard Courant, being Jewish, would fall victim to these policies and more detail is given in his portion of the book.

Sadly, I believe Hilbert passed away without seeing any real resurrection of the mighty Gottingen that he had helped create with Felix Klein so long ago. Fascism would tear down all the work these men had done and simply undo the great the strides being made there seemingly overnight.

This brings us to Richard Courant. Courant eventually came to Gottingen and worked quite closely with Hilbert. He started out being an assistant to Hilbert, but eventually found his way amongst their celebrated faculty. He fought in World War I and was rather fiercly loyal to Germany. As Hitler rose to power, he had even been moved by some of the ideas being brought forth there. This was, naturally, before the horrifying undercurrent of Hitler's nationalism was truly well known. Sadly, for Courant he found himselves in the crossfire of the new regime. He commission was dismissed from Gottingen fairly early on. However, it was interesting to note that the pro-Aryan policies were not something that were enacted upon Hitler taking charge. It was a rather slow-burn over quite a few years. I think a lot of people read about World War II and think things happened very quickly, but Courant remained in Germany for quite a few years after his dismissal. Trying to appeal to the government to get his job back or trying to be hopeful about the situation. This all bore out in letters to his colleagues around the world. Eventually, as we know today, things took a much darker turn.

There is a story of a student by the name of Teichmuller who was after Landau. Landau was eventually dismissed from this students efforts. Teichmuller was described by the faculty as being insane. He was an absolute Nazi loyalities joining their paramilitary branch very early on. Landau, being Jewish, naturally wound up in Teichmuller's cross hairs and Teichmuller eventually won out. The interesting part of the letters that Reid dug up was that even though many described Teichmuller as being insane, they also noted he was a genius. There is a branch of mathematics called Teichmuller theory that still exists today and it is based on only five papers written by Teichmuller. Teichmuller would eventually meet his end fighting on the Eastern front, which he volunteered to do. However, I like to think he would have eventually been executed at the Nuremburg trials even if he had survived the warfare. When I was talking with another graduate student on the history of Teichmuller we both marvelled how someone could be so gifted in a subject like mathematics, which is based on incredible logic, and then be so out of their mind as to think their faculty needs to be purged of the teachers that taught them! We can both see why the faculty often referred to him as an insane person.

Despite the hardships imposed, Courant wound up being very lucky and managed to escape to the United States along with many other German scientists during the 30's as they sought to escape the turn in politics. Most of the faculty at places like Gottingen were not at all prejudiced, so things became more dangerous for those who even supported their colleagues. Luckily a large portion were able to escape to other areas before war would really break out.

Courant came here and founded an institute with the help of New York University at the time. It was a major player in bridging the gap between Pure Mathematics and Physics. Courant always pushed for an Applied Mathematics styled school and he eventually built one. Once again, the famous names that he surrounded himself with were quite incredible. Aside from his efforts to help the U.S. government fight the war with research, he also used his influence to save quite a few people from the Nazis after he left. He would pay for whoever he could to come over to the U.S. and reading about this effort to save others when he could was an amazing thing. It really showed the character of Courant and one hopes they can live up to such greatness in similarly trying times.

While I have paraphrased the overall story and offered some opinion of the tales where I found it interesting, I highly recommend reading these books. These are more than stories of mathematicians. These are stories that tell of a trying time in history. It gives us special insight into how the changes of political winds would affect others. How it wasn't just a sudden turn of events, but instead of a subtle threat at first turning into something much more dire as time went on. It was a rather incredible thing to see who was choosing to leave before the new regimes policies truly got out of hand. In sum... pay attention who is leaving your nation if you live to see such times.

Through it all was some wonderful mathematics. Tying together a joy that brought people together through one of the most creative disciplines one could devote themselves to. A truly wonderful story and it makes me want to track down and read more of Reid's books.

As with the other Aliens comics I've reviewed, I read these as individual issues. This series was originally published back in 1993 and this is one of the better comics I've run into from Dark Horse so far. Finally a lot of the pieces of a solid Aliens comic are coming together. Sure, it's a bit of a rehashed story from earlier works, but I felt this one was written far better than some of the others. Earlier comics teased some of these ideas, but some of their conclusions or general writing got sidetracked in some way, in my opinion.

This is also one of the first series published post Alien 3. It largely abandons the overall narrative that Dark Horse was building in a sort of alternate Aliens universe. So, maybe they felt it worthwhile to refine some of the ideas of the earlier lore, but without the baggage of a different timeline. This also puts things in a position where they no longer have to retcon the series after the fact. Dark Horse also tries to stay away from writing stories based on the films around this time as well, and instead make up entirely new adventures so there won't be any issues going forward. For me, this was the greatest idea, because, while I do like the Aliens franchise and movies, having entirely new adventures within the universe with different characters has a freer form to the experience.

“Rogue” is a bit cliche at this point with regards to the setup. We are, once again, brought to a secret research facility with a mad scientist trying to exploit the alien organism. He will stop at nothing to achieve his aims, even if that means sacrificing a large portion of the Colinial Marines stationed there as his own research guinnea pigs. It's a fairly standard fair story setup for Science Fiction and nothing new is brought to the table in that regard.... and at this point, I'm not expecting anything revolutionary from this franchise, what I do want is a good story with good characters and a good adventure. “Rogue” delivers on that part and it's written well enough that I tore through all for issues again after not having read them since the 90's.

Dr. Kleist, who everyone calls Professor, despite not being associated with a university and teaching classes as far as I can tell... runs a small research facility on a remote and converted penal colony. He is looking for a way to make a more tame Alien. This sort of idea showed up in earlier issues, especially the whole Earth War sequence, but in this case Kleist is trying to achieve these goals through genetic manipulation. Needless to say this winds up being a recipe for disaster and in his desperation for subjects he starts looking at the Colonial Marines stationed there for security. This, naturally, creates a huge issue with the marines and an obvious security risk should anything go wrong.

The time in question where these comics take place is different though. Enter Captain Joyce Palmer there to deliver another doctor to review Kleist's research. Palmer is an ex-marine herself and has ulterior motives for taking the long haul job to fly this guy out the facility. She's looking for the truth behind what is happening with the marines on station. Her cargo... he might not exactly be who he claims as well. Together they will find themselves in a tense situation as the horrors of Kleists research become unleashed on the facility, because of course they were, this is an Aliens comic after all!

While the setup and story are one told time and again, I did enjoy this series. Ian Edginton did a great job crafting it within the Aliens universe and I found it to be an enjoyable adventure. Will Simpson did an excellent job bringing it to life. While Simpsons' Aliens were a bit different compared some other artists, I think his art fit the feel of the story quite well. This entire story is so much better than the Colonial Marines comic series Dark Horse is simultaneously publishing at this time. So, if you're looking for a solid tale of mad scientists doing anything to realize their vision in the Aliens universe, then this one is quite well done.

Solid 4.5

This is the first book after the major turning point in BattleTech known as the Clan invasion. Robert N. Charrette returns to give us some insight into what Wolf's Dragoons are dealing with post invasion. They're one of the most famous and popular Mercenary organizations in the setting, so it's no surprise, realy, to have the first book return to their story. Since Natasha Kerensky returned to her Clan, this is one of the first with her absence, so we'll have to find closure to her story elsewhere since this story focuses on the Dragoons' new homeworld, Outreach.

I didn't really know much about the overall history of the Dragoon's, so I actually found this novel quite a wild ride. As I've usual felt about Charrette's writing, it tends to move a bit slow for me. So, it wasn't really until half way through until I found this novel really picked up for me. This novel sort of brings us into the realms of the “next generation” or at least bridges that a little bit. It's not strictly as cliche as being just a story about the next generation. Instead this deals with the fallout and risk of adhering to Clan rules by taking some as bondsmen into your forces. Jaime Wolf may have miscalculated a little as this regards his new personnel. I think Charrette did a good job of telling that particular thread, especially with how precarious events became. At the very least, as this novel picked up, we can clearly see that whatever happens with the end of this book, the structure of the Dragoon's was going to be different.

We get introduced to some new major players in this book as Brian Cameron and Maeve, who wins the surname of Wolf eventually. Maeve was a much more interesting, whereas Brian was more of a white bread lovelorn character of sorts. He didn't really have any flaws other than being a bit of the plucky character type. Maeve, on the other hand, is cast as moving towards legendary hero status, so her path was much more interesting to read about, sadly the major portions of the book are told in the first person diary form from Brian. Luckily the entire book doesn't run this way, otherwise I think I would not have liked the book very much.

One thing that I was rather shocked to see show up was some closure concerning the feud between Kurita and the Dragoon's! This was a thread that had been left hanging for a very long time. I'm not going to spoil the outcome, but that entire thread was pretty unexpected. That's one of the major reasons that a small portion of the first half turned out to be a bit of a page turner, until things slowed to build political intrigue for the final climax of the book.

As usual, I quite enjoyed Charrette's writing at the end of the day. He does a good job of giving us insight into the inner workings of one of the most secretive mercenary groups in the entire Inner Sphere. I think, despite, some of the slowness of the books, he does an overall awesome job of bringing us into the world of the Dragoon's. If you've been following BattleTech all the way so far, I think you'll be in for quite a wild ride by the end of this novel. I'm, honestly, very interested to see what the future outcome of this novel's events will be in the greater story arc of the Dragoon's into the future!

First, I truly enjoyed reading this novella. It's an extremely fast read and enjoyable all the way through, but it has one of the strangest pre-requisites I've ever come across in my reading journey. In order to truly understand what this novel is about, you need to shop at an IKEA at least once. I confess, that I had never been to an IKEA when my significant other picked up this book and after reading this she insisted we make the journey of an hour and a half drive one way in order to meet this pre-requisite. I have to say, despite my misigivings, the journey and getting lost within IKEA was worth it for being brought into the wonderful journey Nino Cipri crafted for us.

Finna brings us into a world where a fantasy version of IKEA is presented to us, and within this maze of a store, the fabric of the universe grows thinner between parallel worlds. So, it not uncommon for customers to wander into other universe which may be quite dangerous. If anyone remembers the show Sliders from the 90's, it has a very similar feel to that particular show. I don't know if the author had ever seen that, but the first three seasons are really very good. If you have seen the show, then I'd wager you'd enjoy this book as well, because the journey our two protaganists take to save a lost customer is a wild one.

So, if you've been to IKEA and wondered what it would be like to get lost in the dimensional gateways of the pre-setup apartments, this is an absolute must read. I also highly appreciated the gender fluid content that was a major part of the two main characters. I truly look forward to reading the next installment of this series.

More of a 4.5

This book covers the history of one of the most alluring and mysterious figures in mathematics, Ramanujan. Most mathematicians are well aware of this character from history, but Robert Kanigel attempts to shed a much deeper light on the man's story. In this regard Kanigel did a wonderful job, although I think he gets rather a bit overly wordy at times. There are sometimes too much explanation to make a point, when it was simply said earlier and clearly. No need for several more flowery metaphors. One thing this does take away for me, is that researching this story and writing this book certainly wound up being a labor of love for Kanigel. Just looking at the “research notes” section at the end of the book is daunting to say the least. I would wager this is probably the most comprehensive history on Ramanujan around.

For those who are not aware, though I can't imagine you've stumbled upon this book and not know... but just in case. Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician in the early 1900's. His career is absolutely non-typical. He had no interest in other subjects other than mathematics, so when he tried to attend university he swiftly flunked out due to ignoring his other courses. He is a man after my own heart in this regard, because it is the other coursework in university, especially plaguing the U.S. colleges that cause us to be distracted and limit our ability to specialize in a field... this hampers our ability to prepare for further study. This system is archaic and pointless. I understand the ideas of having a well rounded education, but people that have a well rounded education tend to have one by choice at the university level. In our society today, specialization in fields of interest is far more needed. If someone is interested in other topics, they will engage them of their own accord, in my opinion, and Ramanujan was living this out... to his own benefit and detriment.

Ramanujan is largely self taught, however, it is not like he had no access to higher mathematics, it was more the problem that he pushed the boundaries in such away that the mathematicians he was in contact with in India had no idea what he was talking about. It is true that he sorely missed out on having access to Analysis as part of his studies. Kanigel points out that as Ramanujan got deeper into the realms of math it was recommended he read a newer text on Analysis, but he was never able to aquire a copy of the book. This, invariably, hurt him when he made his way to England to work with G.H. Hardy. Hardy was obsessive when it came to proof and analysis, so he endeavored to teach Ramanujan as best he could. Hardy was well aquainted with the fact that intuition and what we may perceive as a pattern in the numbers may not hold true in general. Thus, Hardy endeavored to help Ramanujan prove his theorems and formulas. Some of which, such as his prime number theorem, were wrong. But, a lot of his material was correct and therein lies the allure of Ramanujan.

It is certainly true that the formulas that were easy to prove have been proven, but some of the things Ramanujan came up with were outright baffling. It turns out they were correct and challenge in proving them was incredible. Some mathematicians would spend over a year trying to prove one of his assertions. Some would require newer and more modern fields to prove what Ramanujan knew decades after Ramanujan wrote it down. This is the real allure of Ramanujan, the sheer mystery behind how he knew what he did. While Kanigel throws open the question at the end of the book with “was it mystical?” I have to disagree. I think Ramanujan was just a prodigious calculator and pattern recognizer. He would spend hours and hours thinking really hard about all this material he was able to find the patterns he was looking for. I don't think this is something that can be taught, mind you, I think he was anamolous in the sense that his mind just predisposed him this ability, it got obsessed with this particular aspect of the world and just ran with it.

It is truly ashame he died so young, because we can only sit here and imagine the avenues of mathematics he could have brought us all down. Where would mathematics be today if he had lived even another ten years? Towards the end of his life he was brushing up against even more advanced topics and there probably would have been no real end in sight.

In the end I quite enjoyed the book. It even has a large amount of pictures to help document the story as well. I really appreciate this careful work and am glad it was included in the book. I definitely appreciated Kanigel's scholarship and the clear effort put into the story and if you are at all curious about Ramanujan and his work with G.H. Hardy from an historical perspective more than mathematical, then this is certainly a worthy read.

I should mention they also made a movie out of this book and it is a very good movie. However, the movie takes some serious liberties with the time frame. It tries to condense all of Ramanujan's life into a mere two hours, which really isn't possible. One of the major liberties they took was with the ages of the characters. In reality Hardy wasn't even 40 when he met Ramanujan, however, the movie casts Jeremy Irons as G.H. Hardy and Irons is well over 40 at the time of this filming. It seems the move tried to go with the “old professor” vibe throughout the film, when in reality a good portion of the people involved were quite young. I can forgive them for this, because Jeremy Irons did an absolutley wonderful job at portraying Hardy. Everything I have read about the man makes me think that Irons did him serious justice. Dev Patel was cast to play Ramanujan, and while Ramanujan is described as being rather heavy in weight in the book... Dev Patel is very skinny. However, again, I can look beyond this because Dev did such an incredible job playing Ramanujan. After reading this book and getting insight into Ramanujan's personality, I think he really brought the man to life again. There are some liberties and embelishments of his time at Trinity, but I think these are made for dramatic effect and an attempt to condense his five years there into the time span of a single film. In any event, I quite enjoyed the movie even if it has some rather serious inaccuracies compared to what I just read in this book.

Despite how long it takes me to read these books, I really do love them. The power couple we fell in love with in [b:Empire of Dust 21864071 Empire of Dust (Psi-Tech #1) Jacey Bedford https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398794655l/21864071.SY75.jpg 41154158] are back for another installment of their epic journey! Bedford continues to craft an ever growing wonderful story with exciting moments of intrigue and action, while providing us with wonderfully developed characters.As many readers may have guessed from the first book, what was a bit of a stop off on Crossways station is far more of the story this time around. In the last book our team was left scrambling away from Olyanda with the settlers to escape the Trust. While they managed to win the battle against the Trust's agents, it was pretty clear to Ben that with the existence of platinum on the planet the settlers would never be safe. So the best idea he could come up with was to seek refuge on Crossways until they could find a safer planet for the settlers. So, Ben cuts a deal that will hopefully be mutually beneficial to Crossways and his team, he offers the platinum to Crossways.Naturally, the Megacorps aren't going to sit down and let a planet rich and platinum slip through their fingers. AlphaCorp and the Trust team up to try and put a wrench into any of Ben and Cara's plans. The real issue is that Ben's old friend Crowder is pulling and manipulating a long line of strings behind the scenes and he makes for a truly dangerous foe. With Cara's major foe Ari out of the way, this novel focuses more on the unresolved issues Ben has with Crowder. There is a bit of a deeper crossover for Cara's growth as she ties up some loose ends from the first novel, some quite satisfying some not so much, but all very well done in my opinion. This novel is even better in one respect, which is the power couple we all expected Cara and Ben to become has really come to fruition in this novel. They really do start to feel like an unstoppable team of heroes, but while they do feel overly lucky, it's not without some hardships along the way.There are so many important things that go on in this book, that I don't want to give much of it away. I will say, one of the major mysteries in the first book concerning the void dragons in the folds starts to really see some resolution. I was super excited when this thread started to get fleshed out more and I can't wait to see if even more mysteries are revealed in the third book. Bedford dropped another massive mystery concerning these elements in her story and I look forward to whatever the conclusion may be.Don't let my reading time fool you, this book is quite a page turner and I loved reading every moment of it. My life is just really busy sometimes and I do not get the time to read novels as often as I would like. Other times, I have the free time and can crank through a ton of them fairly quickly. Sadly, I started reading this when things got hectic, but I've literally carried it with me everyday until it was finished! If you loved Empire of Dust I have no doubt you will enjoy this book as well. Ben and Cara and their whole team are some of the more enjoyable characters I've met in a novel series so I am here to enjoy their journeys until this series end! Til next time.

More of a 3.5

As with the majority of my graphic novel reviews, I read these as individual comics as well. Now, I have played Warhammer 40k a few times and I thought it was a pretty decent game. I never got into it to the level some players have, but I've dabbled in it. The models are super cool and I've even played a few of the video games as well along with a couple of the novels. While I do have a bunch of the comic books printed in this series, this is actually the first series I sat down and read. The story and lore surrounding Warhammer 40k seems pretty interesting, albeit a bit overly complex at times, but they make it work.

Usually I associate epic scale battles with the likes of Warhammer 40k, so I was surprised to see this short comic series about a small elite group of the Sororitas. In this story a mining planet is at risk of falling into corruption, I assume by the Chaos Daemons, even though this is never really explicitly stated. The mission for our Sisters is to retrieve a person on planet that was sent there earlier to investigate the corruption. The higher ups are very interested to get their hands on this person, because they might be able to bring some insight into why people abandon their loyalty to the Emperor.

The story sort of reminded me a bit of Necromunda where they are trying to fight their way into the depths of a city. Overall, I thought they did a fairly decent job of presenting the complexity of the Warhammer 40k universe for readers, especially in such a short five issue series. The fighting is intense and exciting, but layered in there is the mystery of the fall of this mining city. I thought the whole affair was pretty exciting and pretty well done given the brevity of the format. It did feel like fairly epic things were happening even though we were focused the primary missions of the Sisters of Battle. I think we wound up being a little short on character development, where only a couple of the characters felt even remotely fleshed out, but I was sort of expecting that given the format and length.

I thought the art in this series was really quite good. I know it's a Marvel comic and I sort of expect that, but I've definitely run into some duds over the years, here and there at least. But I think they did a great job of portraying the city structures and keeping everything staunchly in line with what I'd imagine a Warhammer 40k mining city to look like! I don't know how this would stack up for the truly die hard Warhammer 40k fans, but I thought this was an enjoyable story at the end of the day.

This should probably hover around the 2.5 mark to be honest.

I really like the Cyberpunk setting a lot. I've enjoyed it ever since reading William Gibson's novels and I love the setting of the original tabletop RPG, but for some reason they just haven't been able to do it decent justice with the past few comic books. I was pretty excited for this one, because it looked like this might tie into the game lore a bit more, but it never really achieves that.

“Where's Johnny” is another short one-off story about a journalist who gets hired around the time Johnny blew up the Arasaka tower and is commissioned to investigate where his body is. I think part of the problem with these one shots is the character development has to be rushed, the writers have no choice. So, if you're over-arching story isn't incredible it feels like a bit of a let down. This is similar to the other one shot graphic novel (which I thought was a little better actually) in that it reads more like “a day in the life of a Night City citizen” than some great story. I think part of the problem is that the reveal, when it happens, it utterly unsurprising for a day in the life of a Night City citizen... so it just feels like we get to the end and are like “well, yeah, that's what's expected to happen.” There's no truly interesting revelation, so we'd have to fall back on character development in order to be invested in a cliché tale... but there just isn't time for that in such a short amount of pages. If you're really looking for a Cyberpunk fix in comic form I highly recommend checking out what Titan Comics has been publishing with the Blade Runner series. That stuff has been far more awesome and I was really hoping that the Cyberpunk comics would be on par with that given how big the world of Cyberpunk is in the RPG realm. A real shame really, it feels like they're releasing a lot of little products rather than a longer running story of 12 issues which, I think, large RPG type games need more of...

Where's Johnny takes us through a bit of the Night City world where, even though you are hired by one person to do a job, it doesn't mean they're working for someone else. And the Corpo's have their hands in almost everything and it's hard to escape their meddling. The journalist in this story goes on a journey to do a job and along the way sort of resigns himself to the fact that the corporations will always be involved in some shape or form and sometimes, just sometimes, their goals can align.

The story isn't generally bad, it's just expect from a Night City tale. The journalists story is supposed to be an agonizing tale of acceptance for things beyond your control, but we never truly have the “agonizing” experience in the way we would with a longer running character, which, I feel, these stories sorely need.

If you're a die hard Cyberpunk fan, give it a read, if not, it's really doesn't have much re-read value anyway, in my opinion. It doesn't take long to crank through, so if you're fiending for a Cyberpunk anything, give this a whirl, it does that at the very least.

I've recently gone through and dug out all my Marvel UK issues, of which I own almost all of them. I remember getting into Death's Head when I was probably in middle school. I actually got into Death's Head II first, because middle school me always thought he looked way cooler... and growing up in the 90's, yeah I kind of still do. However, the original Death's Head was quite the cult classic, so when it came time to look in on some of these old characters that have cult status at this point, it's no surprise they chose one of Marvel UK's most popular creations.

I have to say, I actually thought this was a pretty fun comic series. It's not exactly what I was expecting and I'm not much of a die-hard marvel fan, so I'm not really on the up and up for whatever new stuff happens in their universe. I think in the true spirit of the Marvel UK they had to do a crossover with a current Marvel story. In this case Death's Head runs into some members of the New Avengers. Tini did a good enough job seeding in the details of why they aren't avengers etc. and really only relied on the fact that you knew who The Avengers were. The first issue or so was a bit confusing, because I did sort of get thrown into that world and felt like I was expected to know these characters, when the only character I actually knew was Death's Head. Either way, I got the gist that this is sort of an alternate universe side story, which ends up just being an excuse to have Death's Head there.

The only Death's Head I haven't read is “The Body in Question,” but based on an overview I read about it, it seems like this comic picks up where that leaves off a little bit. Here Death's Head is being called out for turning in his bounties slow, which erupts in a fight, as expected, and finds himself transported to modern day Earth. He quickly runs into Wiccan and Hulkling from the New Avengers... they also quickly get into a fight. They do try to devote some time to talking out the misunderstanding... that is until Death's Head discovers another model of himself in their possession. This part was a little goofy, but it did serve to move the story along and finding out where the new model, V, came from.

At this point, the comic was fairly entertaining, but luckily Kate Bishop showed up and really made the read a lot more fun. In trying to solve the mystery of V they run into Dr. Evelyn Necker and she was the one who created Death's Head II, or Minion when she created him. This is an alternate reality Necker, but I felt like throwing her into the Death's Head original line was kind of weird. Even in the other timeline her minion project wasn't based on Death's Head, she was just making cyborg's to protect Mys-Tech and that whole major aspect was ignored. In this comic she seemed highly focused on trying to create Death's Head, but if I remember correctly he's really from the year 8995, so any model she makes will surely be less superior. In any event, a fight ensues, because of course... for... uhm... reasons, and this is where it got a little confusing. But I will say I was still quite entertained at the very least.

I really enjoyed the art on this comic though. I think in the final stages as Marvel UK was going through it's death throes the art and writing started to slide pretty dramatically, so seeing things drawn to this caliber was really nice. I don't know a huge amount about art from a technically perspective, but I really thought it was very well done for what it's worth.

I'm not sure how much classic Death's Head fans will like this, yes? I was entertained, I was never a massive fan of Death's Head and Death's Head II was really my go to. I suppose it's worth a shot, it's only a four issue mini-series, so it doesn't take a lot of time commitment. This is also one of the few times Marvel has dived into the UK archives, so I figure it's worth checking out for that fact alone.

I've played Magic: The Gathering the card game since around ‘94, my interest in the franchise seems to wax and wane a bit. I've known novels have existed, but I was always too obsessed with TSR publications when I was younger, so I primarily read that material, but as usual, I like to start at the beginning for things, if I can. So, rather than jump into more recent publications, which they don't seem to be publishing as novels anymore, instead as short ebooks, I tracked down a copy of the first Magic book ever published a while ago. Part of my, sort of, disinterest is that I've come to find a lot of Fantasy novels to be really formulaic. There's not a ton of new things to do in the genre and, hell, Lord of the Rings kind of fleshed out everything that genre really ever needed to a certain degree. So, having a cool world build can't carry a mediocre novel that much for me these days, since all the world builds just have the generic overarching similarity to them. But, a fun story is a fun story at the end of the day and if you can pull that off, I'm there for it and I have to say Arena is a pretty fun story, but that might be the nostalgia... I certainly didn't walk in expecting anything ground breaking, especially from a 1994 novel.

There are serious problems throughout, such as the general sexism... which I don't know how much that is just “oh, medieval times were like...” and a general disregard for general people, or “the mob” as Forstchen only sees them. The constant killing and disregard for the mob did get kind of annoying, I have to admit. But modern novels have changed pretty drastically since I started reading them in the 90's, and so has this card game.

I confess, I was interested on how Magic would translate into a novel, given the fact at this time there was no real overarching story for the card game. The game was more about cool fantasy things in a game format other than an RPG like D&D. So, that was kind of the allure of the game, but to make a novel out of it, seemed a bit of a tall order. Well Frostchen managed to meld the worlds somehow and I don't know how much this first novel shaped the future of the stories or game, because at some point Magic really transitioned into having themed based card sets and made them based around a story of sorts in the block format, so novels during that setup are very clearly interwoven with the story of the card set. When Arena was published that's really not how the cards were setup. The entire Ice Age block was retconned after the fact, but this novel was published around the release of 4th Edition, so the book would probably be based on cards from the Revised era.

Forstchen actually managed to write a novel that tied the cards and the game concept into a pretty fun story. The whole point of the card game is to have dueling mages, so he created a backdrop motivation of having a Festival where mages in a particular city are pitted against each other to find out who is the best. This is super in line with the actual game format where tournament play is one of the biggest aspects of this game, so he wrote that into the novel. On top of that he created five magic houses that compete, but wait, one was destroyed years ago! This doesn't really work with Magic's five color concept, but suddenly a mysterious stranger, Garth One-Eye, enters the city and starts to create controversy. The grand master who presides over the festival feels threatened, while Garth sows chaos amongst the Houses. We journey through the city with Garth as he enacts a careful plan he'd been arranging for years outside of the city. Throughout this journey there are quite a few magic duels, as any fan of the card game would expect. One thing I quite appreciated is the names of the spells were drawn from actual cards, I figured that would be the case, but I wasn't sure at first, because the House colors are not those of the colors in magic. Like they have an orange House color instead of red, I wasn't sure what the point of changing the actual colors was, and they never said, but at least the names of the spells are directly from cards.

The only thing I didn't like as much was around the middle of the book things started to feel a bit repetitive. Garth went from House to House, basically doing the same thing, every encounter wound up being a Magic duel, so it felt like dueling was being replaced with character development at some point. In some ways I wound up being excited for sections where there was no duel, since it had been done so often. Since Garth was playing with his deck, the duels got repetitive as well, because he used a similar strategy to defeat a lot of opponents. But Garth's deeper powers were only revealed at the end when faced off against a Planes Walker who was basically bleeding that world dry of its mana. The whole end of the book was really good in that regard.

I think if you're a fan of the card game you'll find this novel a rather fun read. I think it would be more fun for people that played this along time ago like I have. Some of those old cards are pretty nostalgic for us and seeing them in the novel is pretty fun. Newer players may not get the same feelings, but the story could still be fun anyway.

It doesn't seem Forstchen ever returned to the world of Magic and I do wonder if this novel was meant more as a fun one off, but then the novels just kept coming. So, I'm sort of expecting drastic changes in the coming novels compared to this, especially as the Magic cards, as a series, had a more solidified stories with recurring characters and themes.

I've finally made it to the end of Thurston's trilogy in this series. It was very slow going compared to the other books/authors I've read in this series. This was, by far, the best novel of Thurston's in this series and it still took me a very long time to read. Even though the content in this book was markedly better, I still couldn't get through it quickly. It would take me a few days to tear through a Stackpole novel, but Thurston takes me a month. I know a lot of people liked this series, but I will never re-read these books.Falcon Guard brings the story of Aiden Pryde to a close. I liked the general idea of this whole series. Michael Stackpole's trilogy told us of the Clan invasion from the perspective of the Inner Sphere, whereas Thurston's trilogy tells us the story from the perspective of the Clans. So, Aiden's story ends with the climatic invasion of the Inner Sphere. Since Stackpole's story sort of filled in a bit of the details already, Thurston kind stayed more focused on what Clan Jade Falcon was doing this, seeing as how Stackpole rather sufficiently handled what Clan Wolf was up to. In Stackpole's novel [b:Lost Destiny 473936 Lost Destiny (Blood of Kerensky Trilogy, #3) Michael A. Stackpole https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1175051202l/473936.SY75.jpg 462199] it was mentioned after the Battle of Tukayyid that the Jade Falcon's had been one of the few clans to eek out a draw. Falcon Guard is primarily the story of that battle and Aiden Pryde's involvement in that battle.As with the other stories in BattleTech this is about a legendary MechWarrior, so they are reckless yet luckier than most. So, while the events can seem over the top, if you've made it this far into the world of BattleTech, you've come to expect it. If you further remember in one of Stackpole's other books, you'll recall that Kai Allard destroyed a large amount of Clan ‘Mechs by deceiving them and then blowing up a gorge and burying them. That unit was the Falcon Guards and it turns out that Joanna was still alive and well from that battle. However, in the Falcon Guards shame for the loss Aiden was put in charge of that particular unit, since he was a tainted warrior. Once the Battle of Tukayyid is announced, Aiden is presented with an opportunity to achieve ultimate honor and the Falcon Guards are given an opportunity to redeem their shame. Amidst all this we are introduced to Aiden's daughter, Diana, who winds up serving in the same unit.I think Thurston did a pretty good job of conveying Clan life, in all of it's strangeness. He did a pretty decent job of showing how alien their society is compared to the Inner Sphere, which is more like human life today, just in the future. I think some of the weird things that the Clans do, such as not using contractions, and anyone who does is viewed as low born, is kind of a weird detail. But that is more from the game designers end of things. I think they were trying to project faddish obsessions some cultures can really lock onto, so maybe it's not too weird. The way you talk in classist societies has always been presented as important historically as well... so I guess they're on point.In the end the story was pretty good, the battle of Tukayyid is as exciting and epic as you'd expect it to be. The total close of the story was somewhat surprising, but I think it was a good ending overall. I do wonder what will happen to some of these characters in the future, but I also hope that will not be written by Thurston, because I have so many BattleTech books to read and his take me forever to read. Historically, Thurston's trilogy is probably a must read for BattleTech fans, unfortunately, for me, it's a read once kind of thing. Stackpole though... I'll probably re-read his books multiple times in my life.Merged review:I've finally made it to the end of Thurston's trilogy in this series. It was very slow going compared to the other books/authors I've read in this series. This was, by far, the best novel of Thurston's in this series and it still took me a very long time to read. Even though the content in this book was markedly better, I still couldn't get through it quickly. It would take me a few days to tear through a Stackpole novel, but Thurston takes me a month. I know a lot of people liked this series, but I will never re-read these books.Falcon Guard brings the story of Aiden Pryde to a close. I liked the general idea of this whole series. Michael Stackpole's trilogy told us of the Clan invasion from the perspective of the Inner Sphere, whereas Thurston's trilogy tells us the story from the perspective of the Clans. So, Aiden's story ends with the climatic invasion of the Inner Sphere. Since Stackpole's story sort of filled in a bit of the details already, Thurston kind stayed more focused on what Clan Jade Falcon was doing this, seeing as how Stackpole rather sufficiently handled what Clan Wolf was up to. In Stackpole's novel [b:Lost Destiny 473936 Lost Destiny (Blood of Kerensky Trilogy, #3) Michael A. Stackpole https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1175051202l/473936.SY75.jpg 462199] it was mentioned after the Battle of Tukayyid that the Jade Falcon's had been one of the few clans to eek out a draw. Falcon Guard is primarily the story of that battle and Aiden Pryde's involvement in that battle.As with the other stories in BattleTech this is about a legendary MechWarrior, so they are reckless yet luckier than most. So, while the events can seem over the top, if you've made it this far into the world of BattleTech, you've come to expect it. If you further remember in one of Stackpole's other books, you'll recall that Kai Allard destroyed a large amount of Clan ‘Mechs by deceiving them and then blowing up a gorge and burying them. That unit was the Falcon Guards and it turns out that Joanna was still alive and well from that battle. However, in the Falcon Guards shame for the loss Aiden was put in charge of that particular unit, since he was a tainted warrior. Once the Battle of Tukayyid is announced, Aiden is presented with an opportunity to achieve ultimate honor and the Falcon Guards are given an opportunity to redeem their shame. Amidst all this we are introduced to Aiden's daughter, Diana, who winds up serving in the same unit.I think Thurston did a pretty good job of conveying Clan life, in all of it's strangeness. He did a pretty decent job of showing how alien their society is compared to the Inner Sphere, which is more like human life today, just in the future. I think some of the weird things that the Clans do, such as not using contractions, and anyone who does is viewed as low born, is kind of a weird detail. But that is more from the game designers end of things. I think they were trying to project faddish obsessions some cultures can really lock onto, so maybe it's not too weird. The way you talk in classist societies has always been presented as important historically as well... so I guess they're on point.In the end the story was pretty good, the battle of Tukayyid is as exciting and epic as you'd expect it to be. The total close of the story was somewhat surprising, but I think it was a good ending overall. I do wonder what will happen to some of these characters in the future, but I also hope that will not be written by Thurston, because I have so many BattleTech books to read and his take me forever to read. Historically, Thurston's trilogy is probably a must read for BattleTech fans, unfortunately, for me, it's a read once kind of thing. Stackpole though... I'll probably re-read his books multiple times in my life.

This is the fifth book in what I refer to as “cat mystery books” and this is the second installment since Braun's long hiatus after the third book. When I first found this series at the library I didn't realize there was a clear and distinct order and I had read book six first. So, I rather knew quite a bit about what was going to happen during this book due to spoilers. However, hopefully that perspective won't mar my review too much.

I think after four novels of Qwilleran running into trouble in the same location, perhaps Braun found a need to change locations. So, in this book Qwilleran takes the summer off to write a novel. He has an wealthy old family friend who will lend him a cabin for writing purposes and naturally Koko and Yum Yum will be joining him on his adventure! So, he drives up north to a small rural lake town named Pickaxe. It was originally a flourishing mining town and seems to no longer be in that industry.

Generally speaking the story was pretty good, but it felt a lot like the first book. Murder mysteries ensue, of course, but antics of the cats are not as prominent as they have been in the past few stories. I think part of the problem with sending Qwilleran to an entirely new location is that Braun had to spend quite a bit of her time world building. Introducing new characters and relevant people. Creating blinds so we wouldn't guess who the real killer was by the end, which I didn't. As with the first book, the end happens rather suddenly. There are a few people we might suspect, but the whole mystery sort of wraps up in a single page. It felt like she was running out of pages and had wanted to write a longer story... so, the cats presence in this book felt more like an afterthought. Sure, Koko finds us relevant clues here and there, but that's about all there is. The actual killer isn't a very prominent character, so it is rather surprising when Qwilleran eventually puts it all together.

I will say though, I quite enjoyed the new setting and all the new characters that were introduced. I just wish she had gone for a higher page count to really craft a great mystery like I know Braun can do. It was still an enjoyable read, it just wasn't, necessarily, what I was expecting after what the past few books had set up.

Now, if I hadn't read the book after this I would be worried this series might begin to stall out, but I am happy to report that the next book is quite wonderful. Now that the general world building of Pick Axe has been established the 6th book feels much more on track with what I really loved about the series.

Solid 3.5While I had a really hard time getting into [b:Way of the Clans 488116 Way of the Clans (Legend of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy, #1) Robert Thurston https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1282529625l/488116.SY75.jpg 476389], “Bloodname,” was a much better read overall. This is the second book in the trilogy and our story picks up where the first book left off. This series is clearly a fairly detailed look into the life of the main character Aiden. If you've spent any time reading the iconic Michael Stackpole trilogy called The Blood of Karensky, then you can tell, basically, how the novel “Bloodname” plays out. In this book you can assume Aiden will be competing for a Bloodname and since there is a third book he will clearly survive that challenge.However obvious the title might give away the general climax of this book, the journey to Aiden's Bloodname competition is a pretty wild ride in itself. The last book left off with Aiden participating in breaking Clan Law by being given a second chance of becoming a warrior by posing as a Freeborn. This book picks up with Aiden's first assignment under the name Jorge where he and his Freeborn team are stationed. He fights with the commanding officer of Glory, Kael Pershaw, constantly. He fights with the Trueborn warriors constantly. Aiden rarely suffers their classist attitudes. In strange turn of events a changing up of the personnel on Glory is imminent and none other than Joanna is about to cross paths with Aiden again. She hasn't encountered him in years and at first sight they begin their old bickering and fighting as we would have expected.At the same time as Joanna's planned arrival Clan Wolf invades the planet with the intent on gaining access to Kael Pershaw's genetic line. Aiden sees a major opportunity to finally see battle! Naturally, he takes that opportunity and uses his deed here and it's success to bid for his chance to win a Bloodname. This part of the story was pretty good in that it gave us insight into Aiden's growth as a character as he changes his mind about the Freeborn warriors and loses most of his prejudice. In same ways I felt that he didn't lose all of it, so it's not like a full turn around and a lot of Aiden's Trueborn tendencies are probably impossible for him to shed anyway.While this was a much better book in my opinion, I still struggle getting through Thurston's writing style for some reason. It's taking me far longer than normal to get through a 200 page novel and I feel like there's some aspect to his writing that just feels really dry to me. It's nowhere near the page turner that I get with Stackpole or any of the other authors I've read for this series so far. It's just sort of frustrating, because I feel like Thurston's story is getting pretty good and the last few fifty or so pages of his books are a fast read. But for whatever reason his setup takes a long time for me to read through.Merged review:Solid 3.5While I had a really hard time getting into [b:Way of the Clans 488116 Way of the Clans (Legend of the Jade Phoenix Trilogy, #1) Robert Thurston https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1282529625l/488116.SY75.jpg 476389], “Bloodname,” was a much better read overall. This is the second book in the trilogy and our story picks up where the first book left off. This series is clearly a fairly detailed look into the life of the main character Aiden. If you've spent any time reading the iconic Michael Stackpole trilogy called The Blood of Karensky, then you can tell, basically, how the novel “Bloodname” plays out. In this book you can assume Aiden will be competing for a Bloodname and since there is a third book he will clearly survive that challenge.However obvious the title might give away the general climax of this book, the journey to Aiden's Bloodname competition is a pretty wild ride in itself. The last book left off with Aiden participating in breaking Clan Law by being given a second chance of becoming a warrior by posing as a Freeborn. This book picks up with Aiden's first assignment under the name Jorge where he and his Freeborn team are stationed. He fights with the commanding officer of Glory, Kael Pershaw, constantly. He fights with the Trueborn warriors constantly. Aiden rarely suffers their classist attitudes. In strange turn of events a changing up of the personnel on Glory is imminent and none other than Joanna is about to cross paths with Aiden again. She hasn't encountered him in years and at first sight they begin their old bickering and fighting as we would have expected.At the same time as Joanna's planned arrival Clan Wolf invades the planet with the intent on gaining access to Kael Pershaw's genetic line. Aiden sees a major opportunity to finally see battle! Naturally, he takes that opportunity and uses his deed here and it's success to bid for his chance to win a Bloodname. This part of the story was pretty good in that it gave us insight into Aiden's growth as a character as he changes his mind about the Freeborn warriors and loses most of his prejudice. In same ways I felt that he didn't lose all of it, so it's not like a full turn around and a lot of Aiden's Trueborn tendencies are probably impossible for him to shed anyway.While this was a much better book in my opinion, I still struggle getting through Thurston's writing style for some reason. It's taking me far longer than normal to get through a 200 page novel and I feel like there's some aspect to his writing that just feels really dry to me. It's nowhere near the page turner that I get with Stackpole or any of the other authors I've read for this series so far. It's just sort of frustrating, because I feel like Thurston's story is getting pretty good and the last few fifty or so pages of his books are a fast read. But for whatever reason his setup takes a long time for me to read through.

Like the Aliens and Aliens vs. Predator novels that have been released, this Predator novel is not an original work, instead it is based on the first comic book series from the 1989 written by Mark Verheiden: [b:Predator: Concrete Jungle 1022975 Predator Concrete Jungle Mark Verheiden https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1180307261l/1022975.SY75.jpg 21678265]. While I thought Verheiden's original ideas for Aliens wound up getting a little ridiculous, I think his work on the first Predator comics had some really stellar ideas. In some ways it was a bit ridiculous, but Nathan Archer did an incredible job fleshing out the story. It made the more ridiculous elements flow a lot better. Now, it's been no secret that Verheiden's comics clearly influenced the ideas behind Predator 2, so if you're reading this book well after Predator 2 and thinking Nathan Archer is quite unoriginal, it's quite a bit the other way around.Since I'm sure Dark Horse wasn't allowed to use Dutch originally, Verheiden created, basically, his twin. However, rather than being on a special forces rescue team, he is a New York cop. It was pretty clear he wanted to write about Schwarzenegger and just wasn't allowed to. I thought this was a rather silly idea and it would have been better to just write about someone else, which is why I think the way Predator 2 turned out was much better. They tried to tie the story too closely to the original Predator film when they really didn't have to. I quite liked his partner character though, Rasche. He was one of the best parts of the book, because Shaefer is painfully rather one dimensional. So there isn't much character development there other than he's the only one who can fight the Predators and seem to win in hand to hand combat.Much like Predator 2 it starts off with the Predators attacking drug dealers and killing them all in an incomprehensible fashion. Shaefer and Rasche are on the scene to try and figure out what happened. Rather than keep the Predators a mystery, since we all know what they basically are after seeing the first film Verheiden and Archer reveal the alien creatures right away. However, in Shaefer's universe there is still quite a bit of mystery surrounding the hunters and soon things lead to what looks like a government cover-up. The infamous General Phillips from the first movie shows up again, which I thought was actually a rather cool overlap from the first film.This leads Shaefer to go on his own hunt, butting heads with his commanding officer as is tradition in 80's/90's cop related stories. This search for answers doesn't give Shaefer any insight into his brother's whereabouts, but it does lead him to the original area in Central America where Dutch managed to kill one. There Shaefer faces his own Predator and also kills it, perhaps a bit quicker and easier than Dutch did, which was a bit ridiculous. However, this was a four issue comic book originally... so they didn't have a lot of pages to devote to a long drawn out epic battle.Shaefer then returns to New York City to face all the other Predators and put up a good fight. This is the part that I found rather ridiculous. Predator 2 had a single hunting party, which makes way more sense, but this novel has a full scale hunting expedition with multiple vessels hovering over NYC. I think this was jumping the gun a little bit in epic scale and I'm not surprised this never really happens again in any of the other Predator tales. It kind of makes the Predators unbeatable in so many ways...Overall, Archer did an impressive job fleshing out this somewhat overwhelming tale. The original story tries to do too much and travel to too many places to stay together seamlessly, but with Archer having more space he manages to bring more details into the mix and give it the flow it rather desperately needed.