It's a good book, and refreshingly free of hysteria. It's written by a scientist, and it shows up in the detailed command of facts and statistics available. If anything, it's a little too detailed -- the author will state his thesis exactly once, and then bury you under so many facts that you wonder by the end what his thesis was. In the end, I had to remind myself every so often of the overall themes by reading the dust jacket.
Still, if there's anything to get from this, it's that a) water wars are uncommon, because the risks are actually too high (you lose, that's it) and b) Canada is going to be busy.
The interesting part is that the author went on a wide trip of Alaska and the cold places (NORCS), but did not spend huge amounts of time in Africa, India and China. Given that many …
Reviews and Comments
I like books.
This link opens in a pop-up window
Review of 'The World In 2050 Four Forces Shaping Civilizations Northern Future' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
It's a good book, and refreshingly free of hysteria. It's written by a scientist, and it shows up in the detailed command of facts and statistics available. If anything, it's a little too detailed -- the author will state his thesis exactly once, and then bury you under so many facts that you wonder by the end what his thesis was. In the end, I had to remind myself every so often of the overall themes by reading the dust jacket.
Still, if there's anything to get from this, it's that a) water wars are uncommon, because the risks are actually too high (you lose, that's it) and b) Canada is going to be busy.
The interesting part is that the author went on a wide trip of Alaska and the cold places (NORCS), but did not spend huge amounts of time in Africa, India and China. Given that many people in India already live near the famine line and people in Africa have huge problems with the climate already, some projections have shown huge amounts of famine and depopulation by 2050. I understand why it's not front and center, as he's primarily about the First World, but it would have been good to cover this in more detail.
Will Sargent reviewed Artichoke tales by Megan Kelso
Review of 'Artichoke tales' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
This is about a land divided between North and South, and the people that live in it.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell these people apart. They all have exactly the same face, and very similar interests -- apothecary, poetry, raising children. In one situation, I had to backtrack as I realized I'd confused the girl picking flowers with the war torn soldier she has a crush on, because they look almost identical -- the only way I could distinguish them is that the man has hairy legs.
And the story makes no sense. Cannon requires technology and infrastructure, and it's nowhere to be found elsewhere. There's supposedly widespread resentment between North and South, but so many people don't know the background behind it. There's not even consistency of time -- people tell stories of their childhood and stories, but the only reference is to "Market Day" -- there's no …
This is about a land divided between North and South, and the people that live in it.
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to tell these people apart. They all have exactly the same face, and very similar interests -- apothecary, poetry, raising children. In one situation, I had to backtrack as I realized I'd confused the girl picking flowers with the war torn soldier she has a crush on, because they look almost identical -- the only way I could distinguish them is that the man has hairy legs.
And the story makes no sense. Cannon requires technology and infrastructure, and it's nowhere to be found elsewhere. There's supposedly widespread resentment between North and South, but so many people don't know the background behind it. There's not even consistency of time -- people tell stories of their childhood and stories, but the only reference is to "Market Day" -- there's no timeline and no year laid out to indicate when someone is envisioning the past, which makes following the story even more confusing.
And for a story about war, the feeling of starvation, of privation and of simmering resentment and hatred... just isn't there. It's more like a family squabble writ large. It doesn't add up. It's a bit like Cerebus in this -- there's clearly meant to be a theory and a logic behind war, but it doesn't hold together in the moment.
The usual warning about subjectivity applies even more so in this review. I'm almost certainly missing something in my understanding of the plot, but the fact that I've had to work so hard just to assign dialogue to the right character means I've absolutely no desire to read it again. So let it be done.
Will Sargent reviewed The Book of Leviathan by Peter Blegvad
Review of 'The Book of Leviathan' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
I read this in The Independent when I still lived in England.
I loved it SO DAMN HARD. It was xkcd before XKCD, before Calvin and Hobbes, it was a baby experiencing life as a complete newcomer wondering what on Earth people were doing with themselves. Imagine if Kurt Vonnegut crossed Martin Gardner.
There is no way I can not recommend this book.
Review of 'Shade The Changing Man Edge Of Vision' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
It wasn't bad at the time. It hasn't aged well, though. Milligan goes for shocks over insight, although he's clearly having fun with it.
Will Sargent reviewed Empire state by Jason Shiga
Review of 'Empire state' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
It's like if Optic Nerve wasn't any good.
There's one redeeming quality -- the asian girl that this guy has a crush on, who at least has the honesty to be clear about what she wants and what her flaws are. The guy... doesn't. Not only is he so boring he spends five pages on the correct way to insert Mylar flaps, he's so dumb he learns HTML by copying the source to a geocities page (admittedly this may not an unforgivable sin to other people, but, but, standards, FFS).
However, the art is delightful and I do feel a bit sorry for this guy simply because he is so outclassed by everyone and everything in the book, the entire time. I hope he gets all the Mylar flaps in the world.
Will Sargent reviewed Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
This book takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten …
Review of 'Fun Home' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
You can tell there is years of work in here. At the same time, it seems unfinished. There's an open question in Bechdel's tale -- how does she know she had an impact in him? Any interest in her at all, it seems, is about her interests as a proxy for his own. His books and studies are given to her, his choice of clothes and ideas, and to the extent that she deviates from that, his displeasure is about the frustration of his desires.
We don't. She doesn't. We can only guess how much love there was.
...man, this book is cold.
Will Sargent reviewed About face 3 by Cooper, Alan
Review of 'About Face 3' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
I am a bit conflicted on this book. On one hand, it is thorough and well composed, giving an overview of almost every common UI widget out there.
On the other hand, it describes UI widgets. And a UI widget does not make a UX, no matter how beautifully it is laid out.
And as someone who has used and suffered through bad UI, I don't think I'm learning anything from tips like "don't overuse dialog boxes." It is pretty obvious why. The detailed breakdown of drag and drop and mouse / keyboard interaction was interesting because it broke from visual confusion to tactile (haptic?) confusion, but I still didn't get any epiphanies from it.
Still. Excellent book for what it is.
Review of 'The Infinite Wait And Other Stories' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
There's a lot in common here between Wertz and Keith Knight, the guy who does the K Chronicles, but where K does comics, Wertz does stories.
I think what I like about this is that it's the story of an ordinary life. The books you read when you were growing up, moving into a new place, finding out what you don't and don't like... little bits and pieces that are all immediately knowable by everyone.
And then she gets lupus, and it just gets sad. And she goes out on dates with people who take her to parties that she hates, and she discovers the Internet ("cute bear pictures" does not Google for what you think) and she finds out about comic books... and she's a real person. A cartoon image of a real person, mind you, but who doesn't have that.
Recommended.
Will Sargent reviewed Full Planet, Empty Plates by Lester R. Brown
Review of 'Full Planet, Empty Plates' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
This is a very short read, but a dense one. It's filled with facts, figures and arguments on food prices, crop yields, water table and aquifer usage, and population density.
And the implication of climate change and population growth is that unsustainable growth... isn't. The population dynamics that assume 9 billion by 2050 are inaccurate, because there's just not enough food for that many people, and the crop yields are going down, not up.
It doesn't say anything that "Plan B" or "Hot" hasn't said in excruciating detail, but that's the point -- this is a book to give to people who haven't thought about the implications of climate change. It's not a personal conversation, it doesn't get emotional or hysteric, and it is meticulously researched. If you want to wake someone up to the problem, this brings people up to speed admirably.
("Look, we're going to be 65 …
This is a very short read, but a dense one. It's filled with facts, figures and arguments on food prices, crop yields, water table and aquifer usage, and population density.
And the implication of climate change and population growth is that unsustainable growth... isn't. The population dynamics that assume 9 billion by 2050 are inaccurate, because there's just not enough food for that many people, and the crop yields are going down, not up.
It doesn't say anything that "Plan B" or "Hot" hasn't said in excruciating detail, but that's the point -- this is a book to give to people who haven't thought about the implications of climate change. It's not a personal conversation, it doesn't get emotional or hysteric, and it is meticulously researched. If you want to wake someone up to the problem, this brings people up to speed admirably.
("Look, we're going to be 65 years old in 2050. At that point, there's going to be food riots, water riots, mass starvation, and no oil, because there' s only so much soil, water, and oil, and we can't make more. What did you think non-renewable resources meant? Oh, and large parts of the world are either desert or underwater. Have a nice day.")
Will Sargent reviewed The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #10)
The Hydrogen Sonata is a science fiction novel by Scottish author Iain M. Banks, set …
Review of 'The Hydrogen Sonata' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
It is very well written, and is much better than Matter just in terms of its character and plotting... But the Ghizt don't make any damn sense at all. They are like a Heinlein military kludged together with Culture tech, and they have all the street sense of a 1950s sitcom character. The Sublime is needlessly obfuscated and repeated as ineffable,but there's no logical reason for it to be quite the mystic experience that it is described as... And the Minds themselves can't quite work out why they are engaged in this exercise, and they don't change anything. The plot of the book is without purpose.
The nihilism in the book is something that shows up repeatedly in Banks novel, but there is not enough payoff for me to say this book is worth recommending.
Will Sargent reviewed Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
Review of 'Infoquake' on 'Storygraph'
2 stars
Imagine if Steve Jobs were transported to a world where people thought he was an asshole and he engaged in sketchy business practices to get to the top. Imagine if you didn't give a shit. Imagine reading this book.
Will Sargent reviewed Crossed, Vol. 1 by Garth Ennis
Review of 'Crossed, Vol. 1' on 'Storygraph'
3 stars
Creepy as hell, but it's just trying too hard to shock. I'd be more effectively engaged if the Crossed were just a little more human -- at least human enough to fake being the people they were from time to time.
Will Sargent reviewed The Hounds of the Morrigan by O'Shea, Pat.
When a ten-year-old boy finds an old book of magic in a bookshop in Ireland, …
Review of 'The Hounds of the Morrigan' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
THIS BOOK IS AWESOME (or at least that's what I said when I was 10).
Will Sargent reviewed Design Driven Testing by Matt Stephens
Review of 'Design Driven Testing' on 'Storygraph'
5 stars
Excellent. This book describes going from an idea to building a design to writing the implementation, which is the closest I've read to my actual development process. It also describes in withering detail why test driven design is not always the best approach to implementing a feature, and how careful design can account for requirement and be traced back.
The use of Enterprise Architect and ICONIX is a little dated, but the principles are solid.