[rtpoe]

Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75 by George J. Veith

It's a bit dry and tedious in spots, but since it is probably the first complete chronicle of the end of South Vietnam to use source material from both sides, I'm willing to give Veith a lot of slack. Especially since he has enough battlefield stories to make up for it. For example, he tells how the Battle of Ban Me Thuot turned on a broken firing pin... ("For want of a pin, the skirmish was lost. For want of a skirmish, a base was lost....")

Veith's main theme is that unlike what the American Lefties would have you believe, the government of South Vietnam was not a corruption-riddled cesspool, her military was not incompetent, and the people of South Vietnam most certainly did *not* want to welcome their Communist "liberators". And it was the shameful refusal of Congress to provide even minimal aid that basically signed their death warrant.

[pedonbio]

So where do you want to waste the next 50,000 American lives propping up a failed colonial government? We didn't sign anybody's death warrant, because it wasn't ours to sign. ~One of those American Lefties

[rtpoe]

I know we have a lot of SF readers here, so I'm mentioning this as sort of a notice/warning...

The Bowl of Heaven by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford

Essentially an updated version of Ringworld, it's not that bad.

Except for the ending, which I quote here in its entirety:

"End of Volume One. Volume Two, "Shipstar", will follow soon."

The thing that pissed me off about this ending is that there's no indication on the cover or anywhere in the promotional materials (that I've seen) that indicates the book is the first in a series.

[salem]

Phantoms by Dean Koontz

Timeline by Michael Crichton

The Slap by Christian Tsiolkas

[pedonbio]

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Tim Egan.

It's a biography of Edward S. Curtis. As such, it is also a study in a valuable obssession, and a pretty good study of the deceptiveness of group thinking. In 1900 vritually all white Americans believed that Native Americans were vanishing; it was accepted "wisdom" that by 1950 there would be no more. Racists though that was good; liberals wanted to integrate them into "mainstream" culture as painlessly as possible. Edward Curtis chose to try to record as much of their lives as he could before they vanished, and produced a great volume of both art and ethnography.

I am hoping that Egan follows up with a volume about Edward's younger brother Asahel, who devoted most of his life to recording the development of an industrial proletariate.

[rtpoe]

Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation by Deborah Davis

Booker T. Washington, president of the "Tuskeegee Normal and Industrial Institute", had been traveling across the US to raise funds for that school for blacks. He'd met many important and influential people during his journeys. Theodore Roosevelt had just come in to the Presidency, and was looking for advice on the many government appointments he had to make. It was natural for the two to correspond on the matter.

On October 16, 1901, Roosevelt had a couple of appointment decisions to make. When he heard that Booker T. was in DC, it was the easiest thing for him to invite the educator to the White House to discuss things over dinner with the rest of the Roosevelt family....

[ge_medic]

Steel Boat Iron Hearts by Hans Goebeler

Interesting look at the U-505. Hans also seems to get with enough women to require a gallon of penicillin.

[Zealot]

Horror Screenwriting by Devin Watson.It started out with some very good details about writing the ideal horror script,but most of it was very generic material concerning screenwriting in general.I also have The Filmmaker's Book of The Dead by Danny Draven,which I will begin tonight.

[rtpoe]

1912: The Year the World Discovered Antarctica by Chris Turney

I'm sure you all know about Amundsen and Scott, but by no means were they the only people leading expeditions to the Antarctic that year. There was Douglas Mawson of Australia, whose team filled in some 2,000 miles of coastline on the map. A German expedition under Wilhelm Filchner went to check on the question of whether Antarctica was a single land mass, or two masses connected by an ice shelf. And Nobu Shirase of Japan led a team there just to do some general research (and because why the heck not?).

Today, with Google Maps and its ilk, there's practically no place on the planet that is unknown. It's astonishing to see just how little of Antarctica was known when these men set out.

[Eliza D]

I know we have a lot of SF readers here, so I'm mentioning this as sort of a notice/warning...

The Bowl of Heaven by Larry Niven and Gregory Benford

Essentially an updated version of Ringworld, it's not that bad.

Hi rtpoe!

What's the basic premise of the book?  Ringworld was just that: a world in a vast ring.  Is this Bowlworld? 

Honestly, I had a love/hate relationship with the Ringworld books.  Great concept, but somehow the series never lived up to its potential, I thought.

[rtpoe]

"Bowlworld" it is!

A giant bowl with a hole at the very bottom, it's rotation sets up a magnetic field that is used to pinch a plasma jet out of the star at the top center of the bowl and aim it out back through the hole for propulsion.

In other words, Dr. Gregory Benford is having fun with plasma physics.

[solvegas]

Well Mr Smartypants, if the bowl is full of chicken soup, what are the physics involved ? 

[DruulEmpire]

I imagine that would involve the physics of a chicken franchise employing the labor of entire galaxies.

[Eliza D]

"Bowlworld" it is!

A giant bowl with a hole at the very bottom, it's rotation sets up a magnetic field that is used to pinch a plasma jet out of the star at the top center of the bowl and aim it out back through the hole for propulsion.

In other words, Dr. Gregory Benford is having fun with plasma physics.

Okay: how big is the bowl?  There's a captive star at the "top"?  What, online with the rim, you mean?  I'm thinking the bowl would have to be, at least, an A.U. in diameter at the rim. 

Now, my next question: is the bowl "open" like Ringworld, with an atmosphere?  I don't see how that could be if there's a hole at the bottom of the sea bowl.  All the air would flush out the bottom and then they'd have to call it "ToiletBowlWorld". 

[rtpoe]

Yeah, we're talking a bowl with a radius of 1 AU or so. I recall something about a "membrane" of some sort that kept the atmosphere in place.

Trust me, though, it's not worth reading just to satisfy the intellectual curiosity.