The Readin Roos

One thing I liked about this book was that it maintained an optimistic attitude without glossing over the past or pretending that the present has achieved perfection. Seeliger presents a pretty balanced view of the zoo's history. She gives readers plenty to smile about (baby animals!), but doesn't shy away from the depressing stories of untimely animal deaths.

I stumbled upon this book while browsing Kobo for free things to download to my iPod Touch. In the introduction, Ellen Walker claims that she is trying to approach the subject from a neutral position and not to fall prey to the tendency of other authors merely to be cheerleaders for the childfree lifestyle. I'm not sure that it's possible to really write from an entirely neutral standpoint about this topic, but she did try to present some of the negatives before focusing on the positives. Walker did a pretty good job of not passing judgments on either decision, but the book still seemed to put a very strong spin on not having children.

Okay, okay, it's geeky to review a book you read for work. But hey, it's still a good book. And I do recommend it to those interested in creating web pages.

Universal design is a concept that reaches well beyond the world of the Internet and the Web. It means creating things--from toasters to radios to computer programs to web pages--that are easy to use for the widest possible group of people.

This book is pretty much what the title states: a story of a group of women who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and the ups and downs of their friendships and what holds them together.It examines how their teen lives, college years, marriages, families, career decisions, illnesses, cross-country moves, and even death affect their friendship. Communications have changed over the last forty years, and so have how these women interact, now scattered across the country. It also discusses the differences in men’s and women’s friendships.

This is a wonderfully-engaging survey of the sciences. Starting out the the Big Bang, Bryson proceeds to explore the founding of the modern sciences by describing not only the intellectual ideas and debates (and the occasional feud) but also the men and women behind those ideas. In fact, some of the more fascinating parts involve those more eccentric characters of 19th century science. Take, for example, the Reverend William Buckland. He wasn't simply an English geologist and founding father of paleontology.

"When the peoples of this Earth first started to explore the waters of the seas, they did not start with some great battlewagon; but, they simply put a log in the water and floated down stream." Thus begins Warren R. Cozby, Jr's book, Nuts and Bolts of Space Colonization (Davis Brothers; paperback) a simple treatise for and on the colonization of space. One day Mr. Cozby had a realization and that realization was reached after reading "many books about science fiction… watching countless hours of TV and movies about the future colonization of man in space."