Book Reviews

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  I think many people, in an effort to be tolerant, accept and praise opinions that are destructive to opinions they dearly cherish. Examples are books, written as fiction, or not really fiction but passed off as fiction, that express private opinions contradictory to positions held by the people who buy and praise these books. One such example is “The Poisonwood Bible,” written by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a best seller, receiving rave reviews by The Media, and praised by Oprah Winfrey on her TV show. Here is my take on it. 

  Careening down the hill, bike gaining speed, eight-year-old Lucinda Franks lifts her hands from the handlebars and soars, going too fast, into the waiting arms of her father, Tom Franks. Thus begins a fascinating and well-written biography of Lucinda’s father, Thomas Edward Franks.

  I found this book very interesting.  I haven’t heard all the arguments in favor of evolution, so I was curious what this man had to say.  Dr. Coyne is a famous biology professor at the University of Chicago well known for his criticism of intelligent design.  

  Who hasn’t heard of Immanuel Velikovsky, the man who rocked the scientific world with his claim that Venus was once a large comet that zoomed close enough to Earth that its gravitational attraction caused the events of the Exodus? I was a young kid when I read his book: "Worlds in Collision" in 1951.  

  Twain originally had "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" serialized in magazines, then published it in three separate booklets, then later in one combined book. It has since been published in many reprints. Mark Twain considered it his most ambitious work; covering the career of someone he admired most of his mature life 

  I read this book after seeing the movie I Walk the Line. I was dissatisfied with the movie and wanted to learn what really happened to Johnny Cash. Still unsatisfied, I looked for more books and wound up reading his second autobiography Cash: The Autobiography 

  I think many people, in an effort to be tolerant, accept and praise opinions that are destructive to opinions they dearly cherish. Examples are books, written as fiction, or not really fiction but passed off as fiction, that express private opinions contradictory to positions held by the people who buy and praise these books. One such example is “The Poisonwood Bible,” written by Barbara Kingsolver. It was a best seller, receiving rave reviews by The Media, and praised by Oprah Winfrey on her TV show. Here is my take on it. 

  I first heard of Carl Sagan around 1960 when he began to criticize Immanuel Velikovsky to refute the speculation of Velikovsky on the probability that there have been near collisions of other planets with Earth during historic times.

  I have often heard of a singularity, better known as a black hole, being described as a situation in which all the known laws of nature no longer apply. I always had a hard time visualizing such a situation. John W. Moffat in his “Reinventing Gravity: A Physicist Goes Beyond Einstein” presents a different, more easily understood, description. 

  I have always been interested in animals and anthropology. I was amazed when the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 and astounded when the human genome was mapped in 2003. Other than curiosity, I never followed these two discoveries until 2014, when I read Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes announcing the discovery of the Neanderthal genome in 2010. 

   Dr. Filler proposes a fascinating new hypothesis about the evolutionary development of apes and humans.  He is well qualified on this subject.   He has degrees in anthropology and in medicine and is both a respected anthropologist and a world famous neurosurgeon specializing in spinal disorders.  An anthropologist friend asked his opinion about a twenty-two million year old fossil that eventually became the inspiration for The Upright Ape. 

  I came across a reference to Richard Feynman's The Meaning of it All, where this famous scientist delivered a speech about the compatibility of science with religion.  Already aware of the controversy between science and Creationism and Intelligent Design,  I bought the book right away and read it with great interest.  

  Mark McCutcheon points out inconsistencies in the standard theories of cosmology, gravity, orbits, magnetism, etc.  He argues that scientists still do not fully understand our universe and its workings, especially energy and forces.  He describes the four fundamental laws of nature proposed by the Standard Theory: gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force.