Home Books Archive by category "By Year" (Page 30)

Category: By Year

Book 7 – Virus of the Mind – Richard Brodie

So I want all the folks who graduated high school and college prior to 1977 who know what a meme is to raise their hands! Did lots of hands go up! If they did then you’re better than me. Until I read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion I did not know about memes. But now after reading that book and Book Number for 2011 Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie I know a little more about this basic unit of cultural transmission and imitiation and memetics which is the study of the working of memes, how they interact, replicate and evolve. A meme (rhymes with cream) is an idea that forms itself into a distinct memorable unit and then is spread through a culture. They are the cultural equivalent of the gene. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Memes can exist concerning any thing in life like danger, fear, sex and religion. Those that are best at replicating themselves keep evolving while others don’t far as well and are replaced. An example would be the Roman and Greek Gods for many years their memes were strong and dominated the culture but when science explained things they lost their ability to replicate and soon faded. Likewise religions like Mithra-ism a and other pagan religions flourished and died, while the memes of Christianity and Islam continued to replicate and be spread. Read More

Book 3 – The Lost Throne – Chris Kuzneski

By Chris Kuzneski

Book No 3 for 2011The Lost Throne by Chris Kuzneski is the fourth book of five in the Jonathan Payne David Jones series and it’s a good one.  I love books that are based on history and teach me something! This one certainly did!  After seven monks are brutally killed at the Holy Trinity Monastery in Greece, Nick Dial, head of Interpol’s Homicide Division is called to investigate the crime. Video footage of the murders reveal that the murders appear to have been commited by Spartans!! Meanwhile ex-special forces officer Jonathan Payne receives frantic calls from a Richard Byrd in Russia who is afraid he is being followed and will be killed! After Byrd is murdered Payne reaches his assistant, a graduate archeology major at Stanford, Allison Brown. Brown, Byrd;s assistant was set to meet Byrd and leave Russia when he was killed. Payne sets out to rescue Brown and discover why Byrd was killed. The remainder of the story revolves around Byrd’s search for the The Lost Throne of Zeus and that puts Payne and his partner on a collision course with the murderers in Greece! The story was great the characters believable and likable and I am certainly going back to catch up on the series! But what did it teach me? Read More

Book 1 – 2011 – Crush – Alan Jacobson

WooHoo! Finally I finished the first book of 2011 – Alan Jacobson’s Crush. It was another book read on the Kindle. I am also reading on the Kindle The Devil We Knew by Robert Baer a book about Iran that we gave to Peter for Christmas, that is really good! Anyway back to Crush. The novel is set in the wine country of California and is the second book in the Karen Vail series. Karen Vail is a profiler who works tracking serial killers. The first book is The 7th Victim, which I saw at Barnes and Noble a while back and made a note on my phone about to look for at the library. But when I got the Kindle I checked out some of the books that I had made notes about and there it was it was for a good price but Crush was a better price FREE! So I’ve read the series out of order! Read More

Books 43 and 44 – Davidson and Levine


So 2010 ends with 44 books read down the stretch I finished two books No 43 was “LEAP “What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives” by Sara Davidson. Conducting over 150 interviews from 2003 to 2006 Sara Davidson has crafted a book that explores what us boomers will be facing as we approach the later parts of our lives. From the dust cover ” she explores such questions as: Read More

Book 9 -2010 – Redemption Street

While I am still working my way through The Midnight House I finished book 9 of 2010 Reed Farrel Coleman‘s Redemption Street. Redemption Street is the second book in Coleman’s Moe Prager series and my first read of this series. Prager is a retired New York City police officer, now running a wine shop with his brother. The story opens when a vagrant Arthur Rosen  comes into the shop and wants Prager to find his sister Karen, only problem is that his sister died in a fire in the Catskills sixteen years prior, with two other girls and sixteen other guests. Rosen, his sister and the other girls all went to the same high school as Prager, with one of the girls being a major crush of Prager’s.  Rosen is convinced his sister is still alive. Prager brushes him off as a crazy and when he goes to apologize a few days later, Rosen finds him, shortly after he has committed suicide and Prager’s name written in blood on his wall. So Prager sets out to set things right and find out what really happened the night of the fire. Read More

Book 8 – Red Sky at Night

While this book is my first read of a book by James W. Hall it is the sixth book in the eleven book series featuring Hall’s  iconoclast beach bum fisherman Thorn. (Anyone know his full name?). The book centers around the senseless slaughter of eleven dolphins at a Key West park that Thorn and his current girlfriend Monica had visited a few days previous. The slaughter is tied to the experiments in pain alleviation being performed on wounded veterans by an old boyfriend of Thorn’s Bean Wilson Jr. Wilson is also being investigated by the DEA for illegal actions and they have placed an undercover agent Greta Masterson in Wilson’s clinic. As Thorn starts to investigate he becomes a target and the rest of the story revolves around solving the mystery of the slaughter of the dolphins and rescuing Greta! Read More

Dark Tiger – William G Tapply (Stoney Calhoun #3) Book 7 of 2010gxz o

Dark Tiger Book 7 of 2010 – Dark Tiger is most likely the last Stoney Calhoun novel by William G. Tapply. Tapply passed away in July of 2009 after a battle with leukemia.  Tapply is best known for his Brady Coyne series which spanned twenty-six years and twenty-five books. Dark Tiger is the third book in the Stoney Calhoun series. Stonewall Jackson Calhoun is currently afishing  guide in Maine and runs a bait shop with his lover Kate Balaban. Read More

A Whisper to the Living (Porfiry Rostnikov #16) – Stuart Kaminsky (Book 6 – 2010)

I wrote two weeks ago about the loss of William G. Tapply and Stuart Kaminsky, two of my favorite authors. Well, a few days after I writing that post, I checked Stuart Kaminsky’s latest an maybe last novel in the  Porfiry Rostnikov out of the library and returned to Moscow. It was good to be among old friends, Porfiry, his wife Sara, son Iosef and his fiancé  Elena Timofeyeva, and Porfiry’s other team members Emil Karpo, Sasha Tkach, and Arkady Zelach. Read More