Category Archives: Book Notes

Notes and Quotes: Arthur C. Clarke’s THE DEEP RANGE (1957)

Posted on Sunday 24 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a relatively quick take on a 1950s novel I reread this past week — not as long or as polished as my Black Gate reviews have been. (I’ll be resuming those in February.) THE DEEP RANGE was the 8th … Continue reading →

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Notes and Quotes: Ezra Klein’s WHY WE’RE POLARIZED (2020)

Posted on Sunday 17 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized was published a full year ago, in January 2020. Ezra Klein is a co-founder of the ‘explainer’ website Vox, and writes essays and columns for various other outlets. (And he lives somewhere here in Oakland.) The … Continue reading →

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Carl Sagan: Cosmos (1980)

Posted on Friday 11 December 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Cosmos may fairly be called one of the foundational books of my life (even moreso than Sagan’s earlier The Cosmic Connection, revisited here in 2015) even though I hadn’t read the entire book until this year. The book was a … Continue reading →

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Rutger Bregman, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS: How We Can Build the Ideal World (2014/2017)

Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a breezy, fast-reading book that summarizes grand conclusions simply and directly, and then provides background references to support those conclusions in 40 pages of notes at the end. The Dutch author is “one of the continent’s most prominent … Continue reading →

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Andrew Shtulman: SCIENCEBLIND: Why Our Intuitive Theories About the World Are So Often Wrong

Posted on Sunday 13 September 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(Basic Books, 2017) Here’s a book I read earlier this year and am only just now boiling my notes down into a coherent summary. (Well actually I started boiling my notes down but ended up just cleaning up the remainder, … Continue reading →

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Heinlein, SPACE CADET (1948)

Posted on Sunday 2 August 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m reviewing detailed notes of books I’ve read in recent years but not yet posted about, and boiling them down into summaries and comments more useful to readers than if I simply posted all the detailed notes. (And in truth, … Continue reading →

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Jonathan Gottschall: THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: How Stories Make Us Human

Posted on Friday 3 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a nonfiction book from 2012 that I just read this past month. It’s one of three or four books I have (another is called HOUSTON, WE HAVE A NARRATIVE: WHY SCIENCE NEEDS STORY) that are about the idea of … Continue reading →

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Frederik Pohl, THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW’S END (1972)

Posted on Saturday 27 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a nice companion book to Pohl’s novel GATEWAY, because one of the five stories here is a prelude that novel. That story and three of the others were all published in various magazines in 1972; the fifth was … Continue reading →

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Frederik Pohl: GATEWAY (1977)

Posted on Tuesday 23 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

[expanded 24jun20 5pm] I need to catch up on book notes. I’m not a fast reader, and am busy with other things throughout the week, reading perhaps 3 hours a day at best, but still get through about 2 books … Continue reading →

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Rutger Bregman’s Ten Rules to Live By

Posted on Monday 15 June 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I do love lists, especially of principles, and a new one comes with a book called HUMANKIND: A HOPEFUL HISTORY, by Rutger Bregman, whose previous book was the provocative UTOPIA FOR REALISTS (which discussed, among other things, the idea of … Continue reading →

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