Book review: The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America by Christian Wolmar

Genre: Non fiction

The Great Railroad Revolution: The History of Trains in America, takes us throught the initial birth of rail travel in the U.S, to the present times.

A large portion of the book focuses on the 18th and 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The current state of railroads gets a perfunctory treatment.

The subject matter the book tackles, is quite interesting. The history of railroad is full of colorful characters and interesting events. The book however never hit its stride and the pace of the book is plodding. The end result is a book that will only appeal to folks who already have a interest in the railroads.

Rating: 3 / 5, recommended if you have a interest in railroads.

Book review: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Fiction.

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk has Carl Streator, a journalist, who while researching sudden infant death syndrome, comes across a African poem, that when read out, kills people. Along the way he teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle a real estate agent, who sells and resells the same haunted houses, for a tidy profit. She knows the culling song too. Her assistant assistant Mona, who is a wiccan, and Mona's boyfriend Oyster. Oyster likes to blackmail businesses by threatening class action lawsuits for non existent issues.

All this sounds like the premise of a pretty decent book. Unfortunately, what we get instead is a lazy book. The plot is thin. The characters and the dialogues are terrible. The book resorts to cheap tricks to pad it thickness, uses list of words, repeated sentences, whose sole purpose is to occupy space. You don't like or hate the characters, you just don't care about them.

Avoid this.

Rating: 1 / 5; Skip it.

Book review: Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

Genre: Science fiction.

Fuzzy nation by John Scalzi is a rewrite/reboot of the novel, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. While Little Fuzzy is in the public domain, Scalzi released Fuzzy Nation with the permission of the Piper estate. I have not read Little Fuzzy, so I do not know how it compares to the original.

The hero in Fuzzy nation is Jack Holloway, a independent prospector, working on a world being mined by ZaraCorp. ZaraCorp's modus operandi is to find a planet worth exploiting and to then strip it bare of its resources. On this particular planet, Zarathustra, Jack Holloway encounters some cat like creatures, that he names Fuzzies. He starts to discover that these creatures are pretty intelligent, and the possibility is raised that these creatures might be sentient. Sentient creatures on Zarathustra would mean that ZaraCorp would no longer be allowed to exploit the planet. This is the premise around which Scalzi develops his story.

The book flows very well and the writing is excellent. Scalzi gets us to like the good guys and the bad guys are believable. The plot is entertaining and well fleshed out and even when one can see a plot twist coming, the way Scalzi executes the plot twists is satisfying and entertaining.

Seeing how well this book turned out, I now feel like reading the original Little Fuzzy, to see how they both compare.

Rating: 5 / 5; Highly recommended.

Book review: Four fish: The future of the last wild food by Paul Greenberg

Genre: Non fiction

Four fish, looks at Salmon, Tuna, Bass and Cod, as the most common wild fish, that can grace supermarket shelves. That we have over exploited many fish species to a point of collapse, is well known. These four fishes have not fared any better. Paul Greenberg has done a good job however, of not focusing only at this negative, but tries to chart a workable way forward with regards to our consumption of fish.

For each of the fish Greenberg looks at - how they were fished throughout human history, how we over fished them, what efforts have been made to keep the wild catches sustainable, what efforts are being made to farm these fishes, whether this farming is sustainable or better then catching them in the wild. For each of these fishes he also looks at other fishes, with similar flavor and texture profile that may be used to replaces these.

One of the strong points he make is that none of these fishes are suited for being cattle. It would be better to select species of fish more suited to that role, before we attempt to domesticate and farm them.

All in all the book flows well, and is a brisk read.

Rating: 5 / 5; Great. Get it.

Related: Hooked, pirates poaching the perfect fish by G. Bruce Knecht