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Napoleon on Napoleon: An Autobiography of the Emperor

wfzimmerman's review: "I have this book because I love Napoleonic history, not because I regard Napoleon as particularly insightful on the subject of himself. What he was good at was finding other people's military weaknesses."
Cassell (1994), Paperback, 304 pages
tags: Napoleonic history

The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words (DICTIONARY)

wfzimmerman's review: "Although I rarely refer to dictionaries, I almost always have fun when I do."
Penguin Books Ltd (1986), Paperback, 304 pages
tags: logophile

Civilization’s Quotations: Life’s Ideal by Richard Alan Krieger

wfzimmerman's review: "Richard Krieger sent me this book years ago and I never got around to reviewing it. But my daughter Kelsey just spent half an hour reading it and says it's very good. She likes the fact that it has a lot of good quotations and the way that the quotations are categorized."
Algora Publishing (2002), Paperback, 220 pages
tags: quotations

Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age

wfzimmerman's review: "I bought this at the height of the Internet boom. It does not add a great deal of value to what is already available in the Chicago and AP Style Guides. Since WIRED is an exemplar of overwrought art design, I wonder what possessed me to think that they would be good arbiters of written style. The book comes in a handsome (although totally unnecessary) box. When you get right down to it, why would you want a reference book in a box? It just makes it harder to refer to. Sure, the complete OED comes in a box, but that's because it is humungous. And this is not a series book. So why the box? Maybe because it makes the book a nice visual artifact for display, which, when you get right down to it, is why I've kept it over all these years."
Publishers Group West (1997), Hardcover, 158 pages

The Chicago Manual of Style

wfzimmerman's review: "I chose this as my standard style reference. They have an interesting online option now but I am not willing to convert something that costs me $0 a yeart to something that costs me $25 a year."
University Of Chicago Press (2003), Hardcover, 984 pages

Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Epidemic by Hillary Johnson

wfzimmerman's review: "This makes me tired just thinking about it. It's ten years later, and there is still a very incomplete understanding of chronic fatigue. I don't doubt that viruses are at fault in many cases, but I am also confident that depression and poor fitness also are responsible for a lot of the suffering from "chronic fatigue." Looks like it will be many years before we can disentangle these phenomena with confidence."
Penguin (Non-Classics) (1997), Paperback, 736 pages

Brass Man by Neal Asher

wfzimmerman's review: "These Asher books are pretty good rock-em-sock-em exotic space opera. I need to go back and re-read his ouevre and decide how much of it I want to collect."
Tor Books (2007), Paperback, 496 pages

Against a Dark Background by Iain Banks

wfzimmerman's review: "A standalone novel by Banks describing the tragic plight of Thrale, a lonely inhabited planet surrounded by tens of millions of light-years of "dark background," with no neighbors. I never think that I've fully understood this book -- there are a lot of unexplained subtleties -- but I think it is one of the most profound meditations I've ever read on the human condition. Here we are, on our own lonely planet, torn by war and suffering, against a dark background."
Spectra (1993), Mass Market Paperback
tags: collecting author's complete works

The Divine Comedy: Hell (Penguin Classics) by Dante Alighieri

wfzimmerman's review: "This is the Dorothy Sayers translation, which comes with her fantastic notes explaining all the allegories."
Penguin Classics (1950), Paperback, 352 pages

The portable Bernard Shaw by Bernard Shaw, Stanley Weintraub

wfzimmerman's review: "Gift from Cheryl, April 1990, inscribed as follows: "To the wonderful man I married with all my love and all my life forever. Your loving wife, always, Cheryl. This book is in remembrance of our beautiful honeymoon!""
New York: Viking Press, 1977. vi, 698 p. ; 19 cm.

Hero: the people of Poland

Democracy stuns Polish coma man - CNN.com

WARSAW, Poland (Reuters) — A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

“It was Gertruda that saved me, and I’ll never forget it,” Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

“For 19 years Mrs. Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband’s position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections,” Super Express reported Dr. Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.

“When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere,” Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system’s economic collapse.

“Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin.”

Thank God for Ronald Reagan.

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