THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION by Adam Tooze

Here is a book that appears to be right up our alley. I picked up a copy at a used bookstore this weekend. Check out the reviews. We have always been interested in finding the reasons behind the Nazi phenomenon. This book gives the economic motivations for WWII. And by all accounts, it is well written.

GAEA Series at Audible.com

GAEA has been wired for sound. Yes that means that TITAN, WIZARD and DEMON are now audio books. Also making the transition to audio are THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE, THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION and PRESS ENTER.

Some of Robert Sawyer's books can be found there as well. Sawyer's FLASHFORWARD has been optioned for an ABC series pilot. Stay tuned...

Some other authors of note that have audio books from the same site:
Philip K. Dick and Larry Niven.

All these are at Audible.com. It looks to be an iTunes clone MP3 download subscription site. I haven't tried it yet, but now that Varley is available, I may have to.

AN EVIL GUEST, Magic Right Before Your Very Eyes

We met to discuss Gene Wolfe's AN EVIL GUEST. Both Rick and I loved this book in the same way. I will make an analogy to try to convey the feeling I got while reading AEG. In the world of stage magic there are the illusionists like David Copperfield and Harry Blackstone. These guys saw women in half, and make elephants disappear. Then there are the street magicians like Chris Angel and David Blane who, on TV, seem to do the impossible. But in both these cases the effects are often so large and incomprehensible that the fan can't even begin to speculate how the trick was done, and we chalk it up to a mere gimmick. Finally, in this analogy, there are the close-up magicians, who do no more than guess your card or make a lit cigarette appear from their mouth. They do simple things, but they do them right before your eyes. The best of them, like Teller, do not even make sharp distracting gestures to befuddle their audience. This is Gene Wolfe in AEG. He tells a simple story, populates it with real people, and, right before your very eyes, makes it fascinating. No tricks, no smoke, no mirrors. He even deliberately tosses away some cool SF gadgets that would be the main attraction in some Hard Science Fiction Sense-of-Wonder novels, but here they are plainly window dressing. Wolfe's skill is doing the impossibly difficult task of holding my interest without any flash. Clearly he has superior insights on how to string words together that make me feel like english is a second language. And most maddening of all? You can read the words over again and still can't see how its done. Magic.

FROM COLONY TO SUPERPOWER by George C. Herring

Rick is recommending a history book for the HMTP: FROM COLONY TO SUPERPOWER: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, by George C. Herring. This is a 1000 page tome that appears to fit in with our other studies. I am especially thinking that it may help us understand why the U. S. became so influential; something I have been pondering ever since reading GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL. The reviews on Amazon are mixed, but there is enough there to let me know that even those who fault it for historical accuracy in a few places, compliment it for prose style. The fluidity of prose has become increasingly more important to me now that I have been spoiled by William Manchester.