Steve Gross

Any Reacher is good Reacher, but it feels like Lee Child is getting a little tired of Reacher. Would like to see Reacher use more ingenuity.

As good as any other one in the series.

A paean to curiosity. Would have been better as an essay than a whole book.

This book felt padded, skewing back and forth in time to add bits and pieces. Why did I need to know that FDR and Eisenhower had affairs? I listened to the audiobook as read by Bill O'Reilly. He was not a good reader - made frequent pronunciation mistakes on words he should have known, such as “Auschwitz”.

First in the Sigma series? Takes place in London and Oman. Slightly long but usual action-packed adventure.

Somewhere between popular and academic styles, this is a fascinating speculation on why many kingdoms collapsed at the beginning of the 12th century BCE.

I was surprised to run across this in the library. At first I thought Hillerman's wife wrote it but it's his daughter. Competently done, although it's her second effort and a major plot point from the first one is revealed.

Excellent book, filled with sources that tries to analyze why humor is funny and what Jewish humor is. Some great but well-known jokes.

Very British and thorough review of the Golden Age of British detective fiction between the World Wars. Lots of portraits of lots of authors. Fun if you like mysteries.

A worthy successor to the author's first book, Ghostman, although not quite as good. The fun in these books is seeing the world through a criminal's eyes and learning his tradecraft, much like a good spy story. That part was not as original and a little repetitive. But the story is still gripping.

Earnest recounting of the author's, a Soviet Jew, path to becoming a professional mathematician and his discoveries. The math gets complicated despite the author's best intents.

A rather bland and episodic history of various Israeli secret services. The authors greatest emphasis seems to be on who the head of which agency is.

Veddy British. Besides the escape stuff, Tunstall spends a bunch of time on what it was like to live in POW camp psychologically. A nice addition to WWII escape literature.

Fun book about science scenarios but a little tiring to read through.

Better than average recreational-type math book.

A very thoughtful book by that rarest of species, a black Conservative, who grew up in the 60's. Steele traces how we got to the division between Left and Right of today. I might have given this five stars but for Steele's use of the word “characterological”.

Boring and repetitive. This is a poorly written book. I must have seen the phrase “dark energy is 70%” at least a dozen times. Chapter 9, which is supposed to discuss dark energy, never really gets around to defining it; Wikipedia can do it in one sentence. Also, why does the author constantly refer to her ex-fiance as “my ex-fiance”? Really, who cares?

First off, this is not a murder mystery. It should have been titled “Day to day activities of a nice but ineffectual modern Conservative Rabbi in suburban NJ”. Terrible.

A comprehensive history of American popular song up till 1965. The author raises a lot of questions in the beginning which are intriguing but never explicitly answers them.

Pretty standard review of mostly female archaeologists working in various capacities.

Well written book that makes the case for Open Science. Best part of the book are the fascinating examples - Galaxy Zoo, Foldit, arXiv.

Standard Carmon thriller. Some action, some interesting spy stuff, some lengthy analysis of tactics.

I really enjoyed this book. I used to think that all the effort put into espionage has, in the long run, not been worth it. This book disproves that idea. Read the real background of the Enigma's solution (a Polish mathematician), the worst atomic spy, the Venona decrpyts and even a spy who aided us in the Solidarity movement and the end of communism.

An introduction to the academic study of the Talmud, which seeks to reveal how the Talmud was put together. The introduction was very good,the example chapters a little less so; but a very worthwhile read.

Really a lecture, not a book on why history should be studied.