Frank McGeough
An older book (1990) in the field of cognitive psychology but a great introduction to the early research that led Professor Seligman (U of Penn) to spend his career researching helplessness and how to overcome it. There are online versions of the various tests in the textbook so I'd recommend using those rather than doing them out of the book and then having to grade them (the online versions do the automatic grading). I'd also recommend checking out his TED talk if you enjoy the book.
beautiful pictures and interesting stories of the providers used by the restaurant and how important every detail is in providing an awesome dining experience. Not a lot of recipes that I thought - “I'll do that myself”. However, there were some tips and techniques on smaller things like sauces that I thought were helpful.
A thorough Javascript book. Good book to learn Javascript if used in concert with the http://www.codecademy.com lessons. The number of examples is a bit overwhelming since they are made up of literally hundreds of small samples. You can download these but I'm not sure how useful they are as a whole. I suppose if there was one or two particular things that you wanted to dig into then it might be useful.
A hard novel to read. Its endless mindless savagery and violence and an incredibly weak plot. Or non-existant plot. There seems to be no reason, no purpose. Its emptiness and death and violence with no real voice of humanity in any of the characters. The most seductive character is the Judge who seems the most evil as well. So...why do people read it and continually give it 4 or 5 stars (myself included). Its hard to explain. For a plotless book the prose is gripping. It seems to be saying something important about that time in America and perhaps even about man's general state on Earth and our relationship to each other. So, the sentences that lead nowhere but to more scalpings, more babies being bashed together, more piles of bodies in saloons, are read carefully to try and figure out - what the heck is he trying to say here. The literary allusions - to Melville, to the Bible, to Paradise Lost - are all there and left to the reader to wrestle with and derive some meaning beyond the horrible bleakness of the violent life that is described. Its definitely not for everyone. It may take multiple tries to get through it. But its a novel worth wrestling with.
A definite page turner and good start to a series. A computer running a simulation for military training has come unglued from its mooring. The simulation is the Demi-Monde - a world within which dupes (duplicates of real people from history) battle against each other for supremacy. The president's daughter is trapped inside the simulation and if she dies in the simulation then she dies in real life. An unlikely heroine is found to go into the simulation to save her. Its all ridiculous and over the top but its fun and decently told.
I just bought: ‘The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel' by Thomas Mullen. Instead of getting a Kindle edition I got a used hardcover. It was $3.49 with no shipping charge vs. $11 for the Kindle book. In any case, the novel concerns the gangster Firefly brothers. Late one night in August 1934, following a yearlong spree of bank robberies across the Midwest, the Firefly Brothers are forced into a police shootout and die . . . for the first time. Are they inhuman? Are they superheroes? who knows. it sounded fun.
Wow. Just a remarkable little science fiction story - although only science fiction in terms of including unexplained time travel. The main character dies on the first page of the novel at 43 and reawakens at 19 in his dorm room at Emory University in Atlanta. After puzzling out what the hell happened he leads his life with his consciousness intact from this last life. He then dies again on the same day at the same time and comes back again...and again. Each time he retains his memory of his many lives. What is happening and why? Does it matter? What does it mean to lead a good life and does having multiple shots at it make it better.. or worse? What would we do different if given a second chance and why don't we do it differently when we do have a chance? And...is there anyone else out there having this same experience? This book was apparently the inspiration for the screenplay for “Groundhog Day”. So read it just for that if you want but its definitely worth reading. Not a long book - despite the repeating lives - and interesting throughout. Will have to read another from this author.
I thought this book started a bit slow but it was definitely fun to read. Time traveling historians are struggling to correct an incongruity because someone has done something and its disturbed the timeline of history. The historians interact with characters from Victorian England and struggle to maintain proper manners while also struggling to ensure the world doesn't get horribly screwed up because of someone's inadvertent actions. Its humorous and well-written.
Its zombies in NYC. How can that be bad? Well...as it turns out, it can be. Very very slow. The story of an everyman survivor named Mark Spitz after the zombie plague. Mark Spitz was hard to care about. Not good. Did manage to get all the way to the end. But barely. I felt like I was reading Wuthering Heights, in that I wanted everyone to just die by the end of the novel.
Jo Nesbo's latest novel available for Kindle. Featuring the alcoholic and nearly ruined (from the previous book) Harry Hole. There's a few earlier works that aren't available yet in English but with the success of “The Snowman” I suspect that won't be true for long. Good writer. Fast paced interesting detective fiction with a flawed but dogged detective at the center of the action. Reminiscent of Raymond Chandler and other early American detective novelists.