Promissory Payback: A Jane Perry Novelette, by Laurel Dewey

The Story Plant, ISBN 9781611880076, August 2011

Jane Perry is a Denver homicide detective, a recovering alcoholic with a painful marriage in her past. When she's called to the scene of a murder early on a Monday morning, it's just part of the job, and in keeping with her low expectations of the human race.

The victim is an attractive woman in her sixties. She was drugged and hogtied, and "Karma is a bitch" is written on her naked back in lipstick. The lipstick tube has been left near the body, and a chair is pulled up by the bed, as if the killer sat there and watched her die in pain and terror. The victim was found by her friend, a woman her own age who looks a decade older who is, she says, responding a little late to an urgent call from her friend the night before.

Iwishacana/Acanawishi, by Larissa Hinton

Amazon Digital Services, August 2011

I really wanted to like this book.

There's a city which is not quite of this world, called Iwishacana. In this city, wishes come true--if you want something you wish for it, and it appears. There are apparently some rules and restrictions, but it's not at all clear what they are. Eventually we learn that babies born in Iwishacana have a chip implanted in their brains, and this is key to how the wish system works. Anissa was not born in Iwishacana, but her mother was, and she has the ability to visit the city, to make wishes, etc.

Creating Personal Presence: Look, Talk, Act, and Think Like a Leader, by Dianna Booher

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, ISBN 9781609940119, October 2011

Creating Personal Presence covers much the same territory as Michelle Lederman's The 11 Laws of Likability, but not, I fear, in as engaging a manner, or with the same thoughtfulness and attention to detail. There's still very good advice and excellent pointers here, and a different emphasis and viewpoint that may be helpful for some readers.

Divided into four categories, Look, Act, Talk, and Think, Booher offers practical advice and illustrative anecdotes from her experience both personally and with clients, on how to present yourself more effectively, communicate more clearly, and be more successful. Dress, gestures, vocal mannerisms, courtesy, and integrity are all covered, with specifics and examples. Booher begins by saying, and emphasizes throughout, that no matter where you are in terms of personal presence right now, you can take steps to make improvements and become more effective. A link to Booher's self-assessment test is provided, to help readers get started.

Banned Books Week Hop

During the last week of September every year, libraries, bookstores, and blogs around the country draw attention to the problem of censorship by mounting displays of banned books and hosting a variety of events. This blog is participating by taking part in the Banned Books Week Giveaway Hop, Sept. 24-Oct. 1.

Kindle Library Lending Goes Live

Kindle Library Lending Goes Live:

 Some rights reserved by jimmiehomeschoolmom

In April, Amazon announced that they would change their long-standing policy and e-nable library borrowing on the Kindle. This feature has now gone live. Using your Kindle to borrow library ebooks will apparently be even easier than with other e-book readers. Your checked-out book will be downloaded to your Kindle via Whispernet, just as with the books you buy from Amazon.

This will enable many more people to borrow library e-books, and should greatly increase the demand for e-books in libraries. This is all good news.

In Seconds, by Brenda Novak: A Review

Harlequin/Mira Books, ISBN 9780778312444, August 2011

Vivian Stewart is living a quiet life in small-town Montana, raising her two children and running her purse design business. But Vivian Stewart has a past, under her real name of Laurel Hodges, her friends and acquaintances don't suspect. Her uncle murdered her stepfather, at her mother's instigation, her brother Virgil spent fourteen years in prison for the crime before being cleared, and joined a prison gang, The Crew, in order to survive. When he quit the gang after getting out, the gang decided to punish him and those he cared about. He has to die, but his sister and her kids, as well as his wife and son, have to die first, so that he'll know about it and suffer.

They've been in hiding under false names ever since. But now one of the craziest, most dangerous members of The Crew, who goes by the nickname Ink, has tracked Vivian/Laurel to Montana.

Goodbye Milky Way, by Dan Makaon--Review

eFfusion Publishing Group LLC, ISBN 9780983378594, October 2011

I wanted so much to like this book.

Unfortunately, we are asked to accept the following inanities: There are multiple secret organizations capable of carrying out government-level projects. Humans, and all life, are the product of Intelligent Design by a space-faring species called the Guardians, who were created by the Elders, who were created by God. And just as intelligent design claims, evolution happens only within phyla; new phyla cannot arise by evolution. For the last sixty or so years, the President has been in regular communication with Earth's own Guardian, via holographic projection chamber at Roswell. Faced with a threat to the existence of the planet, the sensible thing to do is to hand the project off to a consortium of those aforementioned private groups, and not even inquire exactly what it is they're going to do. When a new president is elected, it's evidence that he's power-hungry and untrustworthy, when he wants to know exactly what all these black ops taxpayer billions are being spent on.

My Troubles With Time, by Benson Grayson--A Review

Kindle Edition, Amazon Digital Services, 2011

When Maynard Snodgrass's mother drops him off, at age seven, at an orphanage, the other kids quickly nickname him "Nerdly." It's not kind, but it is true. With looks plain enough to be boring and not ugly enough to be interesting, an excellent brain, and a self-effacing personality, Maynard evokes either complete disinterest, or a certain amount of resentment because it's just human nature to resent those you take advantage of. And Maynard gets taken advantage of a lot, because he doesn't have the confidence to say no. It's still happening when he's an assistant professor of physics at Miles Standish University, writing the department chair's papers and getting no publication credit, and not even getting tenure. So he pursues a dream, and invents a time machine.

Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick--A Review

 Open Road, ISBN 9781453210475, March 2011 (Original publication, Viking Penguin, 1987)

This book, over two decades old now, is one of the great classics of science popularization. It was a blockbuster bestseller at the time, and it's still well worth reading, a fascinating, enjoyable introduction to one of the most important scientific developments of our time--the birth of chaos theory.

One of the compelling features of the chaos story is that this scientific breakthrough wasn't a physics, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, or biology breakthrough; it was all of them. A mathematician turned meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, builds a "toy weather" on what's still a fairly early computer in the early 1960s, and in working with the parameters, concludes that long-term weather forecasting is doomed--a simple deterministic system is producing unpredictable results. Mitchell Feigenbaum, a theoretical physicist at Los Alamos in the early seventies, and two other scientists working together independently of him, are working on the problem of turbulence and.discover that it doesn't, as anticipated, build up gradually in an orderly manner. Reach the tipping point, and there it is.

9/11 Memories

Ten years ago on this day,*  I was sitting in my office at work in Concord, NH when my phone rang. It was my sister, who was working from home that day, and had the tv on for background. Background, until the news came on that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers. She called and told me about it, and I almost voiced the question in my mind--a small plane or an airliner. But that was too crazy an idea, and I didn't ask. We hung up, and I thought briefly about the tragedy, and got back to work.

Then Lynda called back, with the news about the second plane.

It was a beautiful, sunny, pleasantly warm September day, and we were at war. We just didn't know with who, yet.