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The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman and Nicholas Klingaman

This book is ostensibly about the 1815 volcanic explosion and lava ejection from Java's Mount Tambora, but what really happens in this book is a drowning: the authors positively drown readers in a relentless heap of anecdotes on weather conditions, weather reports, peoples' comments about the weather, peoples' diary entries on the weather, reports on failed crops, explanations of weather phenomena and more meteorological minutiae from that era than you can possibly imagine. The book goes nowhere and at just over halfway through I decided to stop taking any more punishment.

I could not finish this book and I'd only recommend it to serious, serious meteorology geeks--even then with great hesitation.

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Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming. And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book. According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educat...
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A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

If you read a lot of books like we do, perhaps you share our problem: Our home is gradually getting overrun by books. Piles of them. Sure, we've made resolutions to control the spread of our collection, like "no more buying books!" and "only get books out of the library!" We've tried these approaches, but unfortunately, not only do rules like these suck the fun out of life, they're also ineffective. The thing is, even though we do get most of our books out of the library, and we don't really make a practice of buying books, we somehow still seem to have more books than we know what to do with. And the piles seem to grow, slowly but surely, with every month and year. Earlier this year, however, we adopted a simple strategy to control our book creep, and it has worked so well for us that I decided to share it with you in this blog: For every new book you bring into your home, you must immediately remove two. It doesn't matter whether you donate th...
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Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand [biography]

"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters." Plenty of insights throughout this capably-written biography of Marshall McLuhan. And the book really develops some genuine heft as it documents McLuhan's intellectual "gestation" as he turned away from the predictable life of an English Lit professor and instead began studying modern media. McLuhan would grow into one of the more idiosyncratic and controversial minds of the 20th century. You'd never guess, but McLuhan was revolted by television, and utterly sickened by advertising. But he also believed that careful study of these domains enabled him to understand, and more importantly to resist, their influence. As the author puts it, McLuhan "was one of those men who, without any prompting, find observation o...
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