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  Geek Sublime - The Beauty of...

  Vikram Chandra

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  Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an "Indian Mafia" in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.

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  Memoirs of a Veteran FBI Agent -...

  Jim Sacia

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  Jim Sacia’s book, “Not in My Wildest Dreams: Memoirs of a Veteran FBI Agent,” is a nostalgic reflection on the author’s 28-year career in the Federal Bureau of Investigations.  
  This unique audio book includes a 30-minute bonus interview with the author where he discusses why he wrote his memoirs, what were some of his favorite stories, what was it like emotionally re-connecting with the stories during the recording of the audio book, and more. 
  ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Jim Sacia grew up one of ten children on a thirty cow dairy farm north of LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  Jim joined the Army following graduation from Melrose High School in 1962.  After a three-year stint, with the Vietnam War heating up, he attended college at the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, where he also served as a police officer. He planned to return to active duty as a commissioned officer upon obtaining his degree.  He graduated from US Army Ranger School and obtained a commission while serving in the Wisconsin Army National Guard.  Fate intervened when he learned that the FBI needed agents.  With degree in hand, the FBI, not the Army, became his next step.  Jim and his wife of forty-eight years, Jenny, have three grown sons and reside on their farm in Pecatonica, Illinois.

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  The Nobel Prize in 1908

  Various

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  The Nobel Prizes are international awards bestowed once a year by Scandinavian committees for cultural and scientific advances. They were established in 1895 by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace were first awarded in 1901.The Laureats of 1908 were:in Physics: Gabriel Lippmann (1845 - 1921) for "his method of reproducing colours photographically based on the phenomenon of interference";in Chemistry: Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937) for "his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances";in Physiology or Medicine: Ilya Ilyich Mechnikoff (1845 - 1916) and Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) "in recognition of their work on immunity";in Literature: Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1846 - 1926) "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life";in Peace: Klas Pontus Arnoldson (1844 - 1916) and Fredrik Bajer (1837 - 1922). This multilingual collection (in Danish, English, French, German, and Swedish) contains the presentation speeches for the Laureats, their biographies, as well as the "Nobel lectures" by the Laureats. (Summary by Availle and Wikipedia)

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  Little Known Facts: Miriam Shor

  Ilana Levine

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  Miriam Shor is an award-winning actress whose star began to shine on stage in 1998 when she played Yitzak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Shor’s impressive resume covers stage (The Wild Party, Scarcity), TV (The Americans, The Good Wife) and movies (Bedazzled, Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Here, she talks growing up in America and Italy, her early acting aspirations through school, and the successes and failures of being an actress.

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  Samuel Colt and Oliver...

  Charles River Editors

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  Gunsmiths in early 19th century America were helped along by noted artisans from Germany, Switzerland, and other European powers, but despite advances made in the European and American musket, the requirement of an exterior spark and percussion to ignite powder for a single-shot discharge remained the paradigm. Similarly, the era was unable to move past the cumbersome weapon that required at least half a minute to reload. The military compensation for such an ungainly and vulnerable process was the alternation of troop lines, in which one fired while the other reloaded from behind. Effective as that was in laying down constant fire and simultaneous reloading, the force as a whole was disabled by a large fraction, and the reloading soldiers were vulnerable to saber attacks on horseback as well. 
  Trapped in the same technological rut as future wars drew near in the new century, Samuel Colt entered the pool of visionaries in search of the invention that would tip the power balance in favor of those who possessed it. As an observant child of the Industrial Revolution, Colt would ultimately lead the way with the most defining design changes in weaponry, and through constant trial and error, he gave the military what it wanted despite fierce resistance and apathy: an answer to the reloading conundrum.  
  	In the manner that Samuel Colt broke open the single-shot tradition in hand weapons, Oliver Fisher Winchester and his celebrated rifle shared the title of “the gun that won the West.” In the arena of portable arms, these two men dominated much of the technological and promotive aspects of 19th century weaponry, alternating between resisting and collaborating with rivals. While Colt created the first effective revolver mechanism for the handgun based on the technology of the ship’s wheel, it was Oliver Winchester who instituted 140 years of branding dominance by virtue of the first reliable repeating rifle.

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  Her Beautiful Brain - A Memoir

  Ann Hedreen

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  Ann Hedreen's story of what it was like to become a mom just as her own beautiful, brainy mother began to lose her mind to an unforgiving disease. Arlene was a copper miner’s daughter who was divorced twice, widowed once, raised six kids singlehandedly, survived the turbulent ‘60s, and got her B.A. and M.A. at 40 so she could support her family as a Seattle schoolteacher―only to start showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease in her late fifties, taking Ann and her siblings on a long descent they never could have anticipated or imagined. For two decades―as Ann married, had a daughter and a son, navigated career changes and marital crises and built a life making documentary films with her husband―she watched her once-invincible mom disappear. From Seattle to Haiti to the mine-gouged Finntown neighborhood in Butte, Montana where Arlene was born and grew up; from Arlene’s favorite tennis club to a locked geropsychiatric ward, Her Beautiful Brain tells the heartbreaking story of a daughter’s love for a mother who is lost in the wilderness of an unpredictable and harrowing illness.

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