"dot.bomb"

dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath (J. "First initials make you look like a douchebag" David Kuo)

Yes, it's another goofy business book. This one covers the rise and unsurprising crash and burn of Value America, a company I'd never heard of, which differed from a typical .com boom/bust story in that it had a vision for a inventoryless system (dealers ship directly to customers), hypothetically cutting costs to a bare minimum. Obviously this didn't work, and if you weren't already put off by that first sentence, you might be interested to read this book. The beginning deals with raising the capital to start the company, and while this could be a little dry, I found that it moved right along. The real meat of the book starts when Kuo joins the company and, well, you know how the .com bubble turned out. Getting there is an interesting ride, if hard to recommend for the general reader - but, like the other goofy business books, I'd recommend picking this up if you see it in your local bargain bin.

Grade: B

"The Battle of Brazil"

The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut (Jack Mathews)

I'm not a huge Brazil fan - I saw it once and thought it was pretty good - so I only read half of this book, that being the book's first part, a narrative history of Brazil's troubled post-production. The second half is the entire 161 page screenplay, which I didn't feel the need to read, even the way it's presented here with every other page sprinkled with interesting factoids. The first half of the book I enjoyed a great deal, but it's a little hard to recommend - although it's well written, it's a well-written history of a backstage Hollywood power struggle, which I don't imagine has a huge audience. I refuse to engage in the pointless cliche of writing something like "If you're a huge Brazil fan, you'll love this book," both because if you are chances are you have it already, and because I have more respect for my readers than to baldly state something so self-evident.

Grade: C+

"Crap Cars"

Crap Cars (Richard Porter)

The Carthage to the Rome that is "The World's Worst Cars". This book differs from that one in that it has only 50 cars (to the 150 included in World's Worst), and the writing is much snottier. These aren't necessarily negative, but this is a really short book, basically 50 snarky paragraphs, and it does feel rather thin. Still, I enjoyed reading it, so I guess I can't be too hard on it.

Grade: C+

"On the Firing Line"

On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (Gil Amelio & William Simon)

Okay, I know what you're thinking: "N Ham, you're extremely smart and good looking. Why the heck did you read this?" Well, I basically read this as a very long footnote to the definitive history of Apple Computers (a book originally titled "Apple"). This book went into more history on Amelio's 500 days as CEO before he was replaced by Steve "Steve Jobs" Jobs.
And how was the book? Well, it was entertaining, I'll give it that - in fact, I think I may need a new category to put this book and "Anatomy of a Business Failure" in. Since this is Amelio's side of the story, he of course paints himself in the best possible light, and while I did get tired of the way that you can never go a huge amount of pages between hearing about his PhD, his jet, his expensive wine cellar, his vacation house, his "Classic 1973 Mercedes-Benz", etc, I can't really say I was ever bored. I'd take anything you read in here with a grain of salt, and I wouldn't read this without reading "Apple" first (which I can't find on Amazon; Maybe a more unique title would have helped), but yes, I did enjoy this book. This is one of those books I personally enjoyed but have a hard time recommending to a general audience. I don't know that you'll get anything from this if you don't know a lot about Apple - for example, I couldn't help but laugh at Amelio bristling at his replacement killing the sad flop that was the "Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh" (which he calls "incredible," and I guess it is since it was a not particularly powerful computer priced, at the low end, to move at seventy five hundred dollars) and predicting doom for Apple after Jobs takes over again.  So I guess I would recommend this book if you already have that kind of knowledge, and it doesn't hurt that I got this out of a clearance bin for $1 (or 1/300th the price of one of the bottles of wine Amelio had to mention he owns).

Grade: C

"Pebble in the Sky"

Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov)

Another book I just couldn't get myself into, sadly. This is one of Asimov's first novels, and it kind of shows - the exposition is clumsy, there's no real main character, and some of the writing is just downright ham-fisted (characters actually go "By Space!"). Normally I'd say there's an interesting idea here, but there kind of isn't: 50's magical atomic power transports an old man far into the future, where, um, there's a guy who made a machine that makes people smart, and, god, this is just not good. Maybe it gets better - I read 100 pages and wasn't interested, so I put it down. Obviously, Asimov's novels got a lot better, but I have to give this one the sad grade of

Grade: D+

"The Siege of Budapest"

The Siege of Budapest: One Hundred Days in World War II (Krisztian Ungvary & John Lukacs)

I just couldn't get into this book. It's fairly dry, which doesn't help, but I think the real problem is the authors familiarity with Budapest; They write about sections of the city as if the name is all you need to get. Coming off a string of local history books, I can see where the Hungarian reader would understand what the authors are saying, but given that I know next to nothing about Budapest, I found my attention wandering. An Amazon I review I read complained about a lack of editing in the book and a possible bad translation, and I feel like there's a good book in here, but, unfortunately, not the book that was presented.

Grade: D

"Conquered into Liberty"

Conquered into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War (Eliot Cohen)

Hey, what a surprise - it's another nerdy history book I like! This one focuses on the "Great Warpath", the region of New York and Canada between Albany and Montreal. By focusing on one area, the author's able to include a wide variety of battles between different opponents (French vs British, Canadian vs American, American vs British) and types of battles (raids, naval battles on the Great Lakes, and even the battle of Saratoga) as he ranges from Schenectady being burned in the 1600s up though the Canadian-British invasion through the Great Lakes in the 1800s, with a postscript of the diplomatic efforts to prevent war breaking out as the centuries go on. Since so much history is covered (and the book isn't terribly long), you don't get the vast depth of a book like Bloody Mohawk, but the sheer diversity in the combatants and types of battles is very interesting. I think I enjoyed the book a little more because of the local connection, but it's well written enough that I'd recommend it even without this.

Grade: B+

"Imperial Munitorum Manual"

Imperial Munitorum Manual (Nick Kyme & Graham McNeill)

I think this is one of the nerdiest books I own. This is the companion tome to The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer, except it's all about the Departmento Munitorum, AKA the supply guys who keep the Imperial Guard in lasguns and pre-packaged meals. If that sounds boring, well, it (mostly) isn't; It's mostly a grimly humorous approach to the red-tape-stuffed bureaucracy of the 41st millennium. You know what, no matter how I describe it, this still sounds boring. Let me put it like this: Although this book, like the Uplifting Primer, sometimes goes a little too far into detail and becomes unpleasantly dry, the book's overall flavor is very entertaining, along with the meticulous attention to detail (The book even has fake copyright and printing information). It's not quite as good as the Uplifting Primer, but it's really not bad.

W40K Nerd Grade: B-
Non-Nerd Grade: D-

"Mass Effect: Retribution"

Mass Effect: Retribution (Drew "Added his last name to my spellcheck and then realized this is his last novel" Karpyshyn)

I liked this book, but I liked the author's previous novel (Ascension) a little bit more; I thought this was still pretty good, but this book suffers from two handicaps that the earlier book doesn't. The first one is that this is a kind-of sequel to Ascension, or at least stars charecters from it; If you haven't read Ascension, I don't know that you'll be able to follow what the fuck is happening. The second one, and the one that really bugged me personally, is that five of the six main charecters appear in Mass Effect 3, and most of them are major charecters on top of that, which means that there isn't a huge amount of tension when they face off in this book - you don't have to be psychic to figure out that, for example, the Illusive Man isn't going to get killed in a spinoff novel. This means that when you have Kai Leng and Admiral Anderson in what's supposted to be a tense standoff, you already know that they're both going to make it out alive so they can appear in Mass Effect 3. Those issues aside, if you've already read Ascension, I'd recommend this, but otherwise I wouldn't go out of your way to read it.

Grade for N7s: B-
Normal Civilian Grade: C-