Steve Gross

Charming, very well-written modern-day fable featuring books, mysteries, technology, codes & Google.

Everything your mother told you was wrong. Interesting and funny, just like all of Ken Jenning's books. Recommended.

Thought this would be a murder mystery set in 1945 in Los Alamos. It was, but there was a complicated love story that took up half the novel. Plus the investigator barely investigated. Giev it a miss.

2 in the Spycatcher series. Lots of time spent on following people. Super spy manages to get almost everyone brutally killed.

If this is true, the future looks scary indeed. The author goes beyond financial reasoning and recommendations to present a staunch libertarian view of the US.

A book that proposes revolutionary ideas about education. I hope he's right.

Fourth and final book in the Khalifa-Ben Roi police novels. Lonnng(538 pages)and full of four-letter words but still reads well.

First in a series of five. Good introduction to how to understand Rashi.

over the top thriller of a righteous but wronged lone assassin fighting the the establishment. The protagonist is a cipher that has almost no human qualities and is not interesting. Should have been called “The Blue Man” due to the excess of profanity.

The author is bright and his career goes from PHD particle physicist to Bell Labs guy to Finance Engineer. Only the latter apparently makes him happy but he really yearns all the time to be back in physics. There's an undercurrent of an unhappy intellectual throughout the book. The latter part of the book is quite technical and only of interest to technical finance types.

Pretty good description of the history of Bell Labs. Mostly focuses on the Labs through a half dozen brilliant and colorful individuals. A couple of flaws prevented a better rating: a fair amount of repetition, as if some chapters were once independent pieces; a curious omission of certain stories, such as Penzias's and Wilson's discovery of the Big Bang cosmic background radiation discovery. I worked in Holmdel for almost 20 years and never once heard the facility described as “The Big Box”. Also concludes with a rather bllitering chapter on “What is Innovation” that doesn't say much.

First in a lengthy series featuring Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, VT police. Nice writing.

Slim but interesting book about the true murder of Rabbi Abraham Kohn, a “Reformist”, by Orthodox Jews in Lemberg, Galicia in 1848. Occasional typos but you can learn about Jewish life and status in mid-nineteenth century Poland.

Supposed to be an in-depth description of how a movie goes from an idea to the screen. This poorly-written book instead spends a fair amount of time on Christian theology and hagiography of CS Lewis's son-in-law. Not recommended.

Excellent, thought-provoking book with a new economic theory to answer three puzzles of Jewish history: 1) There were one million Jews in the year 0; why aren't more Jews today? 2) Why did Jews go from farmers in the Talmudic period to merchants and craftsmen? 3) Why did Jews migrate to Europe and North Africa? A new and substantial way to answer these questions that has large implications for the Jewish future.

beautifully crafted book with color illustrations but the writing is not very clear.

Well-written thriller featuring Egyptology, cutting-edge science and paranormal stuff. I really don't like paranormal stuff.

19 in the Rick Brant series. Surprisingly sophisticated for a 50 year old boy's book.

First in a series about a hip, quirky book restorer. Trouble is that hip and quirky doesn't come through half the time. It might improve with more in the series but i won't be finding out.

One of the many books about getting Bin Laden. Relatively straightforward but jumps around a lot which makes it confusing at times. Probably a better book out there than this one on this topic.

First of a series featuring Ruth Galloway, an archaeologist who is fat, single, has cats, lives alone in a desolate place. Enough said.

Written by the brother of Lee Child, who writes the Reacher series. Prose is somewhat Reacher-ish. Many short chapters and each one starts with a flashback to the protaganist's training. This wears failry soon and doesn't seem all that connected. Plot is also kind of weird.

Way overblown. Author sounds somewhat smarmy as he tells you the answers to brainteasers.

Another Reacher excellence, although could have been a little shorter.

Just what the title says: a nice treatment of Lean's 5 epic films: Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter and Passage to India.