The Plot
Over a period of years, John Gilkey targeted rare book dealers, using a combination of schemes to fraudulently acquire valuable books. Though he was caught many times, he always returned to his predations. Ken Sanders, a book dealer who was also security chair of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, was determined to stop him.
Continue reading “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much (Allison Hoover Bartlett)”
The Plot
As a child, Alan Turing gave little indication that he was likely to amount to anything. But as a young man at Cambridge, he soon revealed his mathematical abilities and his original way of envisioning problems. During World War 2 he contributed in a highly significant way to the British and American efforts to break the encrypted German military communications. And after World War 2 his vision of computers — and computer programs — proved incredibly prescient.
Continue reading “Alan Turing: an enigma (Andrew Hodges)”
What follows are short reviews of nonfiction children’s books with ‘Halloween’ in their title. Let’s see if we spot any trends.
Halloween: Why We Celebrate It The Way We Do by Martin Hintz & Kate Hintz (1996)
A plain, old boring pumpkin on the cover of this. It might as well be a pumpkin book. Or an autumn book. Or, heck, Thanksgiving. Seriously, they couldn’t even be bothered to carve the thing?
Page 8 starts ‘wear for Halloween’. What happened to the first part of the sentence? I scan back. The previous two pages are pictures of two kids in costume. The line before that on the previous page is apparently a caption for another photo. Or something. Continue reading “J’s Take on Nonfiction “Halloween” Children’s Books”
I didn’t know anything about these guys before I read the book. What I knew about it was pretty much solely from the front cover. Two friends, presumably guys, on a cross-country road trip to correct typos. It sounded cool.
It was cool. The story is told from Jeff Deck’s point of view, so I’m not sure how much of a hand Benjamin Herson had in the writing of it. At times I may say ‘he’ when it should rightfully be ‘they’. So, in this case, my next sentence was going to be: And Deck is actually pretty funny. But maybe it’s both of them that are, since they wrote it together.
Deck, and this time I do just mean him, hits on this idea of going cross-country correcting typos. I think it’s just the sort of thing a certain type of young guy decides to do. Road trip, nothing too new there. Correcting typos.. well, now you’re getting into geek territory. And I think the two of them are much more of the geek persuasion than they let come through in the text. Even references to Frodo can be passed off as literary rather than geeky.
Continue reading “J’s Take on The Great Typo Hunt”
