Would you buy a used copy of The Great American Bathroom Book? You must know that it's been read in a bathroom sometime in the past. There is a hilarious episode of Seinfeld where George is browsing at a bookstore, but needs to relieve himself, so takes a book on French Impressionist Art off the shelf and sneaks it into the bathroom. When he's done, he gets caught by the store owner and is forced to buy the book which is quite costly. From then on he decides to try to sell it to recoup his money, but no one will buy the book because they somehow sense it's been in a bathroom. While this book is pretty cheap, only a buck, it's darn certain to have been treated to informal bouts of "fumigation" if you will. Buyer beware, no refunds!
I came across this book at a recent visit to Barnes and Noble and almost bought it, then checked the library and sure enough they had hidden a copy at the Cascade Park branch. I put a Hold on it, and got it delivered to the Vancouver Community Library and dug in with gusto. What I found is a fantastic book that covers everything, and I mean everything having to do with evolution, genetics, history, institutions and of course race. Even among the braver souls of science, the Evolutionary Psychology (EvoPsych) folks like Pinker, Cosmides, Tooby, et al who do admit that human behavior is subject to evolutionary pressures, they still refuse to admit that human groups might have drifted apart genetically over the last 10,000 years, as though there is one race for all eternity. Had Darwin believed this, he would have never noticed the variety among the Galapagos Finches. Nicholas Wade, writer for Science and the New York Times explains that just because all we can find of our ancestors is bones, and bone structure evolves slowly (but not imperceptibly) we cannot overlook the fact that it can take as few as 5 generations to change the aggressiveness of animals using artificial selection. Natural Selection works the same way, which explains why we no longer burn witches, instead we self-domesticated our race and now we give them treats every October 31st. I have read a lot of books in this genre over my lifetime, but this is the very best book on the topic so far. Don't waste your time with The Bell Curve, this book goes so far beyond every other book on the topic that after reading it, you will have a thorough understanding of so many topics that your understanding of the human race will crystalize into the immutable truth of us all. We all share the same genes, but tiny, almost imperceptible differences give the world the Diversity we live in today. Back in February I told you how to write your own book using CreateSpace. Well, some of my friends listened, and now I am happy to show you two new books written by friends who chose to use CreateSpace. Some of you in the local area may, or may not know that we have a music industry legend in the area. Robert TenEyck is an inventor and electrical engineer who was responsible for many great guitar amplifiers, including the Teneyck guitar amp. Robert's autobiography The Shortest Distance Between Two Events Is Timing is a hilarious account of Robert's life. In one tale he recounts how, while hitchhiking in New Jersey some boys picked him up and drove him past his house and dropped him off 3 miles beyond. Then they came back and picked him up. To find out how many times they picked him up and dropped him off 3 miles from his house, get the book, don't wait for the movie. One of my friends in Italy has written a really cool book on photography. Luigi Barbano's new book Photography: The f Manual isn't like some dusty old treatise you might find at the Booknook. Luigi's book talks about everything from f stops to file formats, the difference between JPG and TIF and how image scaling and DPI relate. His section on how camera, computer monitor and printer color calibration works is explained so well, you'll never forget it (just think toast). It even has in-depth explanations on photo composition, HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, depth of field, printing your images, publishing, and more. Luigi's English is pretty good yet his lovely Italian flavor and sense of humor still come through. Our own Zita Podany, chief architect of the Friends of Vancouver Community Library website, long time Booknooker and Friend of the Library has written a book published locally. Vanport is available now for pre-order. I've ordered my copy and can't wait to see it! Sorry to give you the spoiler in the title of this post, but what is the answer? On April 15th, Jeopardy!, which was being watched by many librarians cheering for a colleague of theirs, one day champ Margaret Miles. The answer was: A critic said that this bestselling author “makes me wish there were more than 26 letters” The final scores were incredibly close, as of course, everyone got the right answer: Margaret 16000 + 15999 = 31999 McKinnie 16200 + 16200 = 32400 Andrew 16600 + 15801 = 32401 (1-day total: $32,401) I love the 1956 movie The Bad Seed with Patty McCormack as Rhoda, Nancy Kelly as Christine and William Hopper (aka Paul Drake on Perry Mason) as Colonel Penmark, Rhoda's father. The movie was based on a play first performed the same year that William March's novel of the same name came out. The library does not have the novel, but the Cascade Park branch has a copy of the play and I just finished reading it. OMG, what a great piece of work! It is especially fun to read if you have seen the movie like I have. One of the best things about the movie is that the most of the actors were simply reprising their roles from the play which ran from December 1954 to September 1955. Only William Hopper was a new addition, quite possibly because the original actor who played Col. Penmark in the play, John O'Hare was busy with a new TV show. The play is slightly different from the movie. In the play only one set is used, the apartment of Col. and Christine Penmark. In the movie of course it's easier to branch out and film several different locales, including the backyard where Rhoda plays with her tea set, and where Leroy, the janitor who gets wise to Rhoda's homicidal tendencies eventually dies after Rhoda sets him and his bed of Excelsior on fire. She is one evil little girl, which is the point of the novel, play and movie: That criminals are born, not raised, that environment means nothing, heredity drives everything. Sure, in the case of Christine it skipped a generation, thanks to Mendelian genetics. However, with Rhoda, the evil of Bessie Danker, Rhoda's grandmother and Christine's psychopathic mother has been resurrected with a vengeance. Watch the movie, read the play. It's a chilling tale. For several years I have been writing a memoir of my travels around the world saving the day at "chip" makers in Asia, the U.S. and Europe. I finally got around to publishing it using CreateSpace.com. I really love CreateSpace, they make publishing a real book super easy. All you have to do is create the document and the cover, then upload to CreateSpace. They print your paperbacks very cheaply right here in the USA. My 130 page 6" by 9" black and white paperback with color cover costs me $2.41 each. They also offer paid services from cover artists, proofreaders, editors, etc, or you can do everything yourself like I did and it costs you nothing. You can download templates for your book or create your own. Once published, your book goes up for sale on Amazon.com and can be automatically ported to Kindle for sale on Amazon's Kindle site. You can charge whatever you want, and sell it around the world with the royalties (35% or 70%, your choice) going straight into your bank account. If you have ever dreamed of writing a book I encourage you to try CreateSpace. I'm published and you can be too! I'm going to admit it, I love Peggy Hill from Mike Judge's King Of The Hill. The 116th episode of King Of The Hill was entitled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret Hill. This very funny episode follows Peggy's short career as a nun. Desperate to get a job teaching Spanish full time, she pretends to be a nun so she can teach at a local Catholic school. In addition to teaching Spanish, Peggy has to teach Catholicism. She makes some major mistakes, such as informing a young girl worried about whether she will see her cat in heaven with: "Well, I don't know where I heard this, but all dogs go to heaven, so I'm pretty sure cats do not." She finally quits when she realizes her fanciful suppositions about Catholicism might be damning her students to eternity in hell. Poor Peggy. If only she had bought a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Catholicism by Bob O'Gorman and Mary Faulkner. This book covers everything you need to know about Catholicism, from Mass to why Catholics were treated so badly in early America. Did you know that John F. Kennedy was almost certain to lose his presidential bid simply because he was a Catholic? Reminds me of Mitt Romney's loss in 2012. We haven't come that far have we? This fascinating book explains many things that most people do not know about Catholicism and may keep you from making dreadful mistakes and faux pas. If you are dating a Catholic, have an in-law who is Catholic or just wondered what is so different about Catholics, you should give this book a try. There are 1.1 Billion Catholics in the world, chances are you know a few. Wouldn't it be nice to know what it's all about? At the Booknook in the Religion section for only $1. We get a lot of donations at the Booknook, that's how we stay in business! When someone brings in a load of books, we volunteers love to paw through the collection as we box it up to be sorted for sales, either in our online bookstore or in the Booknook. A recent donation contained this gem: Plain Talk is a collection of articles from the magazine of the same name that was published from 1946 through 1950 to combat the Red Terror that was (and still is) Communism. Filled with articles written by Margaret Mitchell, Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, Harold J. Laski, Ludwig Von Mises and many more, this book will give you a good idea of what the world was like in those frightening years following WWII. Not in the Booknook yet, but just wait, it will be on the shelves soon! North Korea is in the news again. They recently claimed to have successfully tested a Hydrogen (fusion) atomic bomb. John Stossel recently had North Korean escapee Yeonmi Park on his Fox show, Stossel. She just released her book In Order to Live on her tragic journey out of North Korea. But I read this book by another escapee from that horrific example of socialism taken to its logical conclusion, A Thousand Miles to Freedom written by (nom de plume) Eunsun Kim. The book starts with Miss Kim laying in her freezing cold State provide apartment, starving to death, abandoned by her mother and sister while she writes her last will and testament at age 11. She had already watched her beloved father and grandparents die of starvation, now she realizes it's her turn. But her mother does return and decides they must escape. The journey is long, arduous, and even after escape to China things are not all peaches and cream. Her mother is sold to a man who wants a son, and needs a woman to provide him one. He's a cruel man, his family is cruel to their new "in-laws", and the Chinese police are always on the lookout for North Korean refugees to return home for punishment and torture. Even after giving him a son, they do get captured, deported and escape again, get caught, escape and try again. Years of hunger, sadness, separation from their new baby brother and each other, torment, backbreaking toil and horrific treatment by the Chinese. And then they escape to Mongolia with the help of South Korean Protestant missionaries for final escape from constant fear to South Korea, but only after they spend months of interrogation to ensure they are not North Korean spies. I read all 228 pages in the space of one day. It was that gripping. While in South Korea I was treated with a trip to a border outpost/visitor center overlooking the north. It was an education of a lifetime. And now I have an inside view of the hell on earth that I could only see in the distance through binoculars from that visitor center. Read this book, you'll be forever changed. I was working at the Booknook last week and stumbled over this book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. It's a very readable work on Evolutionary Psychology, my very favorite subject, so I splurged and dug out $1 in change. (Yes, we volunteers pay the same price as everyone else.) The first three chapters explain the basics of Evolutionary Psychology and then the following chapters ask questions and provide answers showing how various human behaviors that can be proven to have been created by evolutionary pressures. For example, men and women are not the same. Women can have a maximum of about 20-25 children over their lifetimes, while men can have thousands if they get rich and popular enough. How many women did Hugh Hefner have sex with? Yeah, that's the point. "But what about The Pill?" Evolution has not yet noticed the invention of birth control so you have to ignore recent history. Our behavior is honed to deal with life 10,000 years ago. This is known as the Savannah Principle, first posited by co-author Satoshi Kanazawa in an earlier work. So, a woman is stuck investing 9 months of pregnancy and several years of upbringing into each child, but a "cad" not a dad, can spend 10 minutes and produce a child and never have to worry about raising it. A poor man may never get to produce a child, no woman wants to marry a homeless guy because they don't want their children to starve to death. But a poor woman can marry a middle class man and produce several children, so the reproductive floor for men is zero, but for women it's not zero. This difference, called fitness variance means that men are genetically programmed to work harder to get rich so they can have more children, whereas women have little to gain by getting rich, from a reproductive standpoint. In fact, rich women have no or few children, poor women have more children. So men are rewarded with more children for working hard, women of any income level can have the same number of children, and in fact, women who stay home to have children rather than having a career will have outbred women with careers. Rich men outbreed poor men, so there are more men who are workaholics, but evolution doesn't reward workaholic women, in fact it punishes them because the spinster workaholic woman leaves no offspring. Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard and current US presidential candidate has no children other than two step daughters, and DNA does not pass down to children who simply live in the same house. This is the real reason there is a gap between men's and women's pay. It may be unfair, but it's natural, and not everything that's natural is fair; just ask the male Praying Mantis who gets decapitated when mating. Nature is not kind, and this book makes that point with gusto. Go ahead and pay men and women the same and the human race will go extinct, no women will stay home to have children, and while women can work as hard as a man, men cannot have babies. Adios mankind. So why do beautiful people have more daughters? Luckily, the Camas library has one copy of this book, and if you go to the library's website you can put it on hold and get it delivered to your local FVRL library branch. The call number is 155.7 MILLER. Check it out, because I'm not giving up my copy of this fabulous book! It was in the Booknook, you could have bought it yourself but you didn't! Death By Spelling is both a serious and hilarious book on a topic that everyone who is literate has to deal with. A misspelling in a letter to the editor, a Facebook post or Tweet, a blog, or (God forbid) on your resume can destroy your reputation for life. This is not a book that is to be taken lightly, even after you pay the outrageous price of $1 at the Booknook, you still have to pass a spelling test at the beginning of the book to be allowed entry into the bowels of this book. This book is full of pronunciation guides, stories on word etymology, and tests. For example, we learn that the word bully comes not from male cattle, but from the Dutch word for lover, boel. The section of London known as Rotten Row is derived from the French for The King's Highway, route de roi. If reading excellent prose is a good way to learn to write without making stupid mistakes, then you should get this book, and then hope that you can pass the plethora ( engorged, esp. with blood) of tests. It's an excellent way to avoid making yourself look foolish in public. Well, that and avoiding Karaoke bars. In the Reference section at the Booknook today! Jessica Watson's book, True Spirit, about her solo, unassisted non-stop voyage around the world at the tender age of 16 will soon be made into a movie. Sunstar Entertainment is working on the movie as you read this. Follow this link to keep up on its progress. To read the book documenting Jessica's amazing feat you'll have to buy it, the library does not have Jessica's book. It's a fantastic story about an incredibly brave young woman.
Sticking with a topic, I borrowed Genetics For Dummies from the library (sorry, it's not in the Booknook) just for fun. Wow, what a great book! It covers everything without going too far over your head, and it lets you skip things you would rather not have to delve into without shaming you or guilting you into it. Very little math is used, and when it is, it's simple multiplication or addition and you are told when to use which operation. And it has a Northwest connection! The author, Dr. Tara Rodden Robinson is a professor at OSU! If you want to know more you can read my review on Amazon. In the library, 4th floor, call number 576.5. Save that date! This year the holiday book sale is a week before Thanksgiving. Buy a handful of books -- perfect as a stuffing in your cornucopias or as a holiday centerpiece. Plus, books are such a great stocking stuffer -- so much better than coal!
This is a hilarious, yet serious and well presented tutorial on genetics. Genetics is an important topic because recent discoveries have determined that genetics control not just skin, hair and eye color, but behavior, vices, political persuasion, mental disorders, intelligence, pretty much everything about you. Your children are products of genetics, your genes plus your spouse's genes, but this book will explain that it's not just an analog blending of traits. Mendelian distribution of traits is explained in exquisite, yet hilarious detail. Learn the difference between meiosis and mitosis, understand the history of these discoveries from the caveman to Darwin to the most recent finds. A great book for only a buck! About a month ago I was working the Booknook and noticed a book on the shelf called The Executor's Guide. My mother had passed away back in January and I knew that my brother, the executor and successor trustee of my mother's estate was having health problems. So on a whim I picked it up for a buck. Two days later I got a letter in the mail. It was from my brother's attorney notifying me that I was going to become the new successor trustee because my brother could not fulfil the duties due to his health issues. What an amazing coincidence! It's been a really helpful guide that has smoothed the transition and helped me do things right so there are no slip-ups in this very important matter. What luck! We have a copy of Allen Ludden's (the host of TV's Password) Plain Talk! For Men Under 21! This book was published in 1954 and this particular copy was bought by a mother for her son in 1963 and contains a heartfelt note in the front matter. If you want to see how things have changed since the 1960s, this book will really lay it out for you. Should you kiss at the end of a first date? I can imagine Allen Ludden's take on Portland's mayor Sam Adams having sex with Beau Breedlove on his 18th birthday welcoming him to the Gay community. This book is full of archaic advice that reminds us life was at one time, pretty safe, friendly and wholesome. Now you never know what's coming your way! Here is an interesting book for those Techies who would rather spend time with a computer than a girl/boyfriend. LOVE+SEX WITH ROBOTS by David Levy is a very interesting, and serious book on how and why people love things other than other people, like pets, appliances and their computers. In chapter 5, Why We Enjoy Sex, David says that reactions to the idea of a robot capable of performing sex acts range from outrage to "where can I buy one?" In STNG's episode, Naked Again (a remake of Captain Kirk's Naked Time) we learn that Lieutenant Yar is able to satisfy her desire for a partner with Mr. Data, an android who despite his positronic neural net is fully functional, and programmed in multiple techniques. This is not the first book on computers and robots David Levy has written, but it is one of the most oddball books I have seen on high tech. A fascinating, and titillating book that may change your idea of a perfect partner. We have it in the Medical section, and we promise to be discrete! Calling all Tributes and soon to-be Tributes! (I just learned that this is your fandoms name after extensive research.) Are you missing either of these books for your collection? Possibly needing a refresher for what is going to happen when Mockingjay pt.2 hits theaters? Come pick up these precious babies! They deserve a nice home on your bookshelf where they will be loved, because this is a fantastic book series (and the movies are pretty great too!) Hey everybody! It's the end of August, so we all know what that means.... School is almost in session!! Here at the library, we have a string of books from the popular Goosebumps series! What better way to start the school year off than picking up some spooky stories? And can I get a Hey-oooo! for the new Goosebumps movie coming out this October? This horror series is aimed at ages from around 7 - 13 years old (though I would say that it really depends on you, the parent, and your child's interests to make the call on whether they are mature enough, my best suggestion is to watch a couple episodes of the show.) All the books are easy and fast reads, there is no *real* order that they have to be read in (though on occasion there are sequels.) Come check them out! The Bad Speller's dictionary is just what the doctor ordered if you are such a bad speller even Google can't help you. Look up Elektristy to find the spelling for Electricity. Look up Poletry to find out how to spell Poultry. Commonly misspelled words are listed alphabetically by their misspelled spelling, which makes sense. If you use a diktionery you have to know how to spell dictionary to find its entry! A great tool for writers who can't spell. Get it today, if you wait it could have been bought yestiday, I mean, yesteday... I mean yesturday! We have a paperback copy of P. J. O'Rourke's All The Trouble In The World in the Economics section at the Booknook. This terribly funny book examines the lighter side of war, famine, overpopulation and various troubles in the world. Especially troubling is Bangladesh's Jute industry! P.J. points out in his chapter Famine: All Guns, No Butter, that the problem in Somalia is not a lack of food, there's plenty of food in Somalia. The problem is that it is in the possession of people with guns. P.J. suggests that instead of donating food to Somalia, maybe we should donate guns so the food can get to the people who don't currently have guns. In the chapter on Overpopulation: Just Enough Of Me, WAY Too Much Of You, P.J. points out that while Al Gore is constantly haranguing people about having too many kids and contributing to Global Warming, he himself has 4 kids and 3 grandkids, which fits perfectly in this chapter. Sure people love their OWN kids, they just hate being outbred by the neighbors who come from places they have never even heard of. Whether you are conservative or liberal you will find yourself laughing out loud at this book, which even has some nice things to say about Vietnam! At the Booknook for only $1! |
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