books

The Problem of Space Travel, by Hermann Noordung, is a good book.

Circa 1970, I read a large number of grade school reading books. One of them had a story in it about a boy who performed various athletic feats. The passage I remember from this book was the boy’s manager saying that his diet was rich in iron, and the boy was getting a part-time job as an anchor.

I recently read this book because I vaguely recalled reading it as a youngster. For the first third of the book, my recollection seemed correct, but then the book diverged from what I remembered. Maybe I didn’t read it back in the late 60s after all.

A 200 page action story from leftist Heinlein Cory Doctorow.

An interesting popular geology and paleontology book. Long, but it has a lot of great ideas, I recommend reading it.

Like every good late Baby Boomer, I watched many episodes of the Tee Vee show M*A*S*H. But I hadn’t read the book.

Everybody who’s had kids knows that they love trains. I’ve visited the Colorado Railroad Museum and the Forney Transportation Museum several times because of kids. Both museums have a variety of steam locomotives. The Forney has a partially restored Union Pacific Big Boy.

I ended up wanting to know how locomotives worked, and why they look the way they do. Unfortunately, the emphasis at museums is always on how cool steam locomotives are, or the “gee whiz” factor. None of the museum gift shop books seemed to have this sort of content, tending more towards the stamp collecting aspects (4-8-8-4!).

My lovely wife gave me a book, How Steam Locomotives Really Work by P. W. B. Semmens and A. J. Goldfinch as a present.

This is a 60-year-old reconstruction of an Oviraptor, from Discovering Dinosaurs, by Glenn O Blough, pictures by Gustav Schrotter, copyright 1960 by Glenn O. Blough. Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 60-8020, Weekly Reader Paperback Book Club edition published by arrangements with McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY.

Have you ever read the Narnia books, or have you only read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe?

If so, you really ought to read Laura E. Weymouth’s The Light Between Worlds.