My Ann Arbor Library Feeds

Review of: D.A by Willis, Connie

This was a very nice YA novella. I wish it had been full-length — she’s really good in this genre.

My only complaint is that when the character learns the meaning of the term “D.A.”, she should learn something of its history.

A bracing Brin-like approach to competition and education.

Review of: Cold as ice by Sheffield, Charles

The first chapter of this book, which describes the inevitable death of a father and his eight-year-old son at the hands of a hunter-killer robot, is as perfect as everything I have ever read in fiction.

Review of: Godspeed by Sheffield, Charles

I thoroughly enjoyed this YA hard-sf novel by the late Charles Sheffield, who was then chief scientist of the EarthSat corporation. He was a terrific writer, with the knack for combining realistic human motivation with fascinating science.

Review of: Null-A continuum by Wright, John C. (John Charles), 1961-

An eagerly anticipated “sharecropping” sequel to Van Vogt’s classic NULL-A. John C. Wright is the perfect choice.

Review of: Star dragon by Brotherton, Mike

I started reading this once and stopped part way through because I thought the idea of a dragon living inside a star was too silly for belief. I came back to this book after reading the author’s second book, SPIDER STAR, and made it all the way through this time. It was worth it. There was a satisfying science fictional explanation for everything.

The one weak spot that still remains is the premise that a corporation would send a hunting party to capture a “star dragon” and start casting nets and firing off photon torpedoes right away. It seems a lot more likely that super smart people in the 26th Century would start the same way we would start today, i.e. with a couple of years of careful, passive observation. After all, they flew 250 light years to find this thing, what’s the hurry?

Review of: Outsourced by Hillhouse, Raelynn

This was eagerly anticipated. The author knows her stuff about the world of "black" operations and she has done a major public service by raising public awareness about outsourcing in the intelligence budget. But the book itself is overly full of technojargon; I found it hard to identify with the protagonist; and most importantly, the plot (which concerns CIA v DOD conflict using "outsourced" contractors") is part of the problem, not part of the solution. By which I mean the book is written from very much a "US-centric" perspective; as if U.S. government bureaucratic squabbles are the center of the universe.

Review of: The accidental time machine by Haldeman, Joe W

tale of a likable MIT student who invents an accidental time machine... for a while the book had me thinking of classics like Stapledon's LAST AND FIRST MEN, but in the end things sort of fizzled out, and the obligatory "closed loop" at the end of the book isn't very surprising or illuminating.

Review of: Dude : the big book of Zonker by Trudeau, G. B., 1948-

My 15-year-old daughter saw this and had absolutely no idea what it was. Who's this "Doonesbury" guy?



I love all funny books, I love all humor collections, and I love Doonesbury. I didn't enjoy this quite as much as I enjoy the yearly collections -- when you get right down to it, Zonker is, by definition, a rather thin character. Still, a must for anyone with '70s nostalgia or a Doonesbury habit.

Review of: Persepolis 2 : the story of a return

Fully up to the standard of PERSEPOLIS 1 -- but read that first.

Review of: Persepolis : the story of a childhood

A very moving account of a young woman's growing up in Revolutionary Iran.