- Review of "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright
The Evolution of God, 2009 by Robert Wright, has two big ideas. Convincing: Our ideas of gods or God evolve in a social and political context. When we see gain in warfare, we imagine a vengeful God, but when our interests lie in [ ... ]
- Review of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockford
An obsessive and eccentric book, but well worth reading.
- Review of "Introductory Graph Theory" by Gary Chartrand
If you are a software developer, then from time to time you will have to solve an Interesting Problem in optimization, such as finding the best matches on a dating site, or the right sharding key for a database cluster. As often as not, such [ ... ]
- Review of "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen
Patience, grasshopper—the book does not promise well, but rewards your effort in the end. We spend the first few chapters with Chip, a po-mo literature professor at some small college. Franzen wastes our time with tired tropes: [ ... ]
- Review of Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf"
I'm going to gradually repost some reviews I wrote on Goodreads; hope you find them interesting. I have three things to say about Beowulf. 1) The ballad itself is not only semi-foundational to English-language literature, but [ ... ]