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I'm on the fence about my rating for this one. If it were on option, I would probably give it 2 1/2 stars. It's a thought-provoking book, and it took me a while to read it because I often found myself staring off into space pondering the mysteries of the universe. (I consider that a positive). On the negative side, I thought the arguments presented here were uneven. Dawkins brings out everything he's got against religion, and some of the arguments are weaker than others. Why spend so much time talking about how there is a correlation between atheism and high IQ, for example? Come on, Professor, we know correlation and causation aren't the same thing (a third factor could be the cause of both, yada yada yada). Respect your reader a little more and get to whatever you consider the real arguments to be, because surely that's not the best you've got.

Dawkins presents his arguments in two main sections, one arguing against the existence of a god or God (in any form - no passes for deists or agnostics here) and the other against religions themselves. I found the God section more interesting, though it seemed to come down to saying that the existence of a god or any external supernatural force would be an extremely low probability event, and the origin of life in some other as yet undefined fashion would also be an extremely low probability event, but the non-god way is less improbable, so it wins. Since science doesn't yet have an explanation for what caused the jump from no-life to life, I don't know how we could know how high or low the probability of that would be to make a mathematical judgement. We are missing some key pieces of data. Dawkins finds the theistic answer inelegant, since it's an infinite regress in that you would still have to explain where God came from in the first place. Certainly that's true, but I don't think this quibble is quite the Q.E.D. moment Dawkins was looking for.

I found the case against religion less interesting overall. The evils done in the name of religion aren't news to anyone, though Dawkins does bring out some interesting less publicized Biblical examples. He also points out that even if there are good points to religion, it doesn't make any difference if there isn't actually a God. But the converse is true, too - even if religions do a lot of horrible things, if there is a God you can't avoid them, so the social impact of religion one way or the other doesn't make the case. It's also in this section that Dawkins must have decided his book wasn't controversial enough, so he takes tangential side-trips into the debates over abortion, assisted suicide, stem cell research, and how the Amish educate their children.

Overall, this was an interesting read, but I suspect it probably hasn't changed too many minds.

I'm not sure quite what to say about this book. Parts of it were fascinating, but I found much of the wild speculation to be hard to swallow, especially with little in the way of sourcing to back the more far-fetched ideas. J.M. Barrie is depicted as a Svengali who manipulates and ultimately destroys the lives of the Llewelyn Davies boys (the real-life models for the Lost Boys of Peter Pan). I can buy that Barrie was a strange person who engaged in some sketchy behaviors. I can also buy that Barrie, Daphne du Maurier, and George du Maurier used a lot of autobiographical background in their writing. It's a stretch, though to start looking for real-life events to correspond to everything they wrote. This book makes it seem like Barrie was responsible for every horrible thing that happened to everyone he knew. Somehow he even gets the blame for Robert Falcon Scott's disastrous polar expedition of 1912! The overall premise is interesting, but without more to back it up this book is just a fantasy as wild as those written by its key subjects.

This Victorian novella, written by a nine year old girl, follows the adventures of Mr. Salteena, "an elderly man of 42 . . . fond of asking peaple to stay with him." Simultaneously sweet and hilarious, part of the story's charm lies in its spelling and punctuation, but the precocious author also had an eye for personalities and social situations.

Many books have been written about the British Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s that culminated so mysteriously in the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine, last seen "going strong for the top," on June 8, 1924. What more could be added to the story that hasn't been discussed before? Wade Davis takes a different approach in Into the Silence. He examines the influences of World War I on the expeditions - on the political backdrop in England, India, and Tibet, as well as on the participants themselves. Almost all of the British members of the expeditions served in some manner during the Great War. Davis weaves their war stories into his discussion of the planning and execution of the expeditions. These snapshots of individual war experiences, including many from the "secondary" characters in the Everest drama, combine to give a highly effective, moving, and horrifying picture of the British experience during World War I. Davis's thesis that the Everest expeditions were felt as somehow redemptive for the generation and nation that had lost so much during the war has validity, and perhaps goes a long way in explaining why these men would choose to subject themselves later to such brutal and dangerous conditions to accomplish something with little pragmatic value.

Davis's account of the 1922 and 1924 expeditions, while well-written and engaging, does not add much new information to what has been published elsewhere (though he does expand quite a bit on Wheeler's role in the 1921 reconnaissance expedition). Where this book contributes to the Everest story is in the meticulous research into the backgrounds of some of the lesser known participants in the expeditions and in the compelling discussion of the social, political, and military background for the events. The annotated bibliography at the end, replacing footnotes or endnotes, should not be missed. There are several fascinating details there.

As for the mystery of whether or not Mallory and Irvine reached the summit, Davis addresses it in the Epilogue in only a cursory fashion. Much more detailed discussion of the arguments and evidence for and against is available elsewhere (I would recommend The Mystery of Mallory & Irvine and Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine). Into the Silence is not about their ultimate success or failure, but about the motivations that inspired their attempt.

George Mallory, mountaineer of Everest fame, was also a schoolteacher. He wrote “War Work for Boys and Girls” during the Great War before his headmaster relented and allowed him to serve in the army. More of a pamphlet than a book, this extended essay advises English youth as to how they can help the war effort. While the title brings to mind British schoolchildren doing things like knitting mittens for soldiers, the actual message of the essay is quite different. Mallory advises schoolchildren to avoid “intellectual laziness,” instead informing themselves about current political issues and preparing themselves to form knowledgeable opinions in anticipation of the war’s end, when good critical judgment will be necessary to create an effective peace. Some of the historical discussion, as well as imagery of “German corpses,” seems aimed at older children, and overall the insights aren’t earth-shattering, but much of the advice is still sound almost a hundred years later.

I love letters. Maybe it’s an innate snoopiness, maybe it’s that people tend to be more unguarded in their private communications, but I find that reading the letters of interesting characters from literature and history is often much more enlightening (and entertaining) than reading their biographies.

And Lytton Strachey’s are some of the best. Strachey pioneered a new form of biography with Eminent Victorians, with a subtly snarky style that pilloried the era’s sacred cows. These days his work doesn’t stand up quite as well as that of some of his better known friends like Virginia Woolf. Still, Strachey was one of the fathers of Bloomsbury, and when it came to the group’s incestuous relationships, he seemed always to be right in the middle of it. He was a lover of the artist Duncan Grant (who later fathered a child with Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister), and he once proposed to Virginia (she accepted but quickly rescinded, to the relief of both). Economist John Maynard Keynes recorded his liaisons with Lytton in his notorious logbook of past lovers, but Maynard and Lytton also competed for Grant’s affections. It goes on.

Suffice it to say that all of this interpersonal drama makes for some revealing letters, especially since Lytton and his friends wrote well, openly, and frequently. Lytton addressed current issues of the day, such as his legal proceedings as a conscientious objector in World War I, with characteristic self-absorption. Few of his friends and acquaintances escaped his snide observations - Aldous Huxley (“produced a very long and quite pointless poem for me to read”), Robert Graves (“curiously oafish sense of humor”), John Maynard Keynes (“sits like a decayed and amorous spider . . . weaving purely imaginary webs, noticing everything that happens and doesn’t happen and writing to me by every other post”), T.S. Eliot (“rather American”).

Lytton had his sensitive moments too. His letter to Clive and Vanessa Bell about his infatuation with George Mallory, the handsome mountaineer who would later die on Everest, is written with classic Strachey understatement:


“Mon dieu! - George Mallory! When that’s been written, what more need be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words - oh heavens! heavens! I found of course that he’d been absurdly maligned - he’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face - ah, incredible - the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an unimaginable English boy . . . For the rest, he’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?”

There are poignant moments too, especially in the letters involving his relationship with his last lover, Roger Senhouse, and his tragic relationship with Dora Carrington, who committed suicide after Lytton’s death.

Strachey himself, in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, sums up best my feelings after reading his letters:

“As usual, it struck me that letters were the only really satisfactory form of literature. They give one the facts so amazingly, don't they? I felt when I got to the end that I'd lived for years in that set. But oh dearie me I am glad that I'm not in it!”

Based on the title, I thought this book would focus more on what ultimately happened on Mallory and Irvine's fatal climb of Mount Everest in 1924, and while it certainly does cover that, the book also serves as an excellent biography of George Mallory. Additionally, it gives a behind-the-scenes account of some of the controversies and in-fighting regarding the Everest expeditions of the 1920s through letters written by members of the Mount Everest Committee at the time. This account adds insight into those controversies not addressed as fully (or at all) in other accounts of the expeditions. The discussion of Mallory's Cambridge/Bloomsbury years also adds new details not covered in other biographies. The research is meticulous and the footnoting excellent. Personally, I don't buy Tom Holzel's final chapter giving his theory as to what happened on the last climb, but I otherwise found Holzel and Salkeld's book to be one of the more enjoyable ones on this topic.

Fearless on Everest is a biography of Sandy Irvine, George Mallory's partner on the ill-fated Everest summit attempt of 1924, written by Irvine's great-niece, Julie Summers. Sandy Irvine was a 22 year old Oxford undergraduate when he lost his life on Everest. While much has been written about the 1924 expedition, Irvine's role is overshadowed by that of the older and far more famous Mallory, who was the dominating force of Everest exploration in the 1920s. In the endless controversy over what really happened to Mallory and Irvine, some theories give the impression that a clueless Irvine was plucked out of his Oxford rowboat and sent up to Everest with no mountaineering skills of any kind or idea of the risks he was taking. Irvine is sometimes seen as an inexperienced climber who may have caused an accident leading to his own and Mallory's deaths, or, alternatively, as almost a hapless victim of Mallory's ambition, being led on a climb he was not ready for.

This biography gives much more insight into Irvine's background and motivations, with interesting details from family recollections and papers discovered by the family in 2000. He certainly did not have the mountaineering experience of his older companions on the expedition, but he was a talented athlete and his background from an expedition to the Arctic Circle in 1923, as well as some rock climbing and Alpine experience, made him not such a bizarre choice for the expedition as previously represented. He was also mechanically gifted and made significant improvements to the oxygen apparatus as well as other equipment used on the expedition. While Irvine's determination to reach the summit of Everest may not have quite matched Mallory's near-obsession, he was highly motivated, maneuvering from the very beginning of the expedition to be considered for the summit team. While much has been written about the 1924 Everest expedition, there is little specifically about Sandy Irvine, and this biography does an excellent job of filling in those gaps.

This book was pretty atrocious. To be fair, the author does state at the beginning that it is a work of fiction, so perhaps it isn't fair to take issue with the extremely wide latitude Archer takes with the historical facts. Paths of Glory is a fictionalized account of the life of George Mallory and the British expeditions to Mount Everest in the 1920s. Some of Archer's fabrications are obviously for dramatic effect. While ridiculous, stories such as having George Mallory climb up the outside of the Eiffel Tower or climbing the bell tower in the Piazza San Marco to impress a girl might have been good stories if there were any truth to them. Other alterations in the history make no sense - why does Archer have the 1922 climbing expedition to Everest making a summit attempt in late June/early July, well into the monsoon season and impossible by any stretch of the imagination? What would have been wrong with using the real dates?

The book's bigger flaw, though, is that despite the embellishments the characters are flat and their speech stilted. Though they are in their 20s and 30s they all call each other "old chap" every other sentence to the point where it is distracting. Maybe this is accurate to the time period, maybe it isn't, but Archer wasn't that worried about accurate details anywhere else in the book, so he could have spared us here. The characters' motivations and thoughts lack substance. The real Mallory and his cohorts were much more complex and articulate. For anyone interested in the actual story, the biographies George Leigh Mallory: A Memoir and The Wildest Dream: The Biography of George Mallory are far more engaging.

The best thing about this book is the title, a phrase from Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" ("the paths of glory lead but to the grave"). Unfortunately, it's all downhill from there.

Though the title suggests that this book is a biography of George Mallory, who attempted to climb Mount Everest in the 1920s, it mentions his non-Everest life very little. It's more of a retelling of the Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922, and 1924. It's a bit sloppy (if the book is called Mallory of Everest, why is the picture on the cover of George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce?) A better alternative for those who want a book that sums up the expeditions is Sir Francis Younghusband's The Epic of Mount Everest. Younghusband was the chairman of the Mount Everest Committee, and his 1926 book, which drew on the individual expedition books from those years, is more accurate and, oddly, probably more racially sensitive than Styles' book, written in the 1960s.

This book follows modern day climbers Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding as they recreate portions of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine's final attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1924 as part of the filming of the documentary The Wildest Dream. The historical portion of this book is mediocre. The Mallory & Irvine story has been covered in many books by this point, and this one unfortunately has several inaccuracies regarding the early Everest expeditions of the 1920s. These seem careless given how much has been written about them. The discussion of Conrad Anker and Leo Houlding's experiences, however, is much better. The background of their lives and motivations for participating in this project are interesting, as is the discussion of their experiences wearing 1920s gear on Everest, and of course their dramatic attempt to free climb the notorious Second Step to see if Mallory and Irvine could have done it.

Howard Somervell participated in the British Mount Everest expeditions of 1922 and 1924. Along with Col. Norton (who went a bit higher), he set an altitude record for a climb without oxygen in 1924 that stood until 1978. Somervell nearly lost his life by choking to death on a piece of his own frostbitten larynx on the descent, but was able to perform the Heimlich maneuver on himself and survived. Like most of the other early Everesters, he was a pretty tough guy, but also passed his down time painting Himalayan landscapes and reading poetry with George Mallory, whom he considered a kindred spirit and close friend.

This book (now in the public domain and available on Internet Archive) is Dr. Somervell's autobiography recounting his Everest experiences and his work as a medical missionary in India after the expeditions. His attitudes about religion, British imperialism, and social stratification are surprisingly modern. He writes also of the medical conditions he treats and the variety of social issues that exacerbate them. His writing style is straightforward though not particularly inspired. It may interest those interested in the early Everest expeditions, colonial India, or tropical medicine.

George Mallory and his climbing partner Sandy Irvine disappeared on Mount Everest in 1924, igniting years of speculation as to what happened to the pair. Even the discovery of Mallory's body in 1999 left many unanswered questions, and some continue to wonder if Mallory and Irvine were in fact the first to summit Everest, twenty-nine years before Hillary and Norgay. While the mystery of Mallory's death made him famous, he was a fascinating character in life as well. He was one of the most talented mountain climbers of his day, but he was also an intellectual, a writer, and a teacher, as well as a close friend of many of the radical thinkers of the Bloomsbury group.

Following Mallory's death, his wife went to his friends to discuss who should write his biography. His long-time friend Lady Mary Anne O'Malley (née Cottie Sanders, the future novelist Ann Bridge) wrote a manuscript, but the climbing establishment didn't think a woman should be the one to write Mallory's biography. Mallory's friend David Pye eventually ended up publishing the biography in 1927, but he collaborated with O'Malley and used a large portion of her manuscript in his book.

Pye's biography is the only published biography written by a contemporary and friend. Unlike other biographies of Mallory, this one does not get much into the details of dates and places. Pye barely mentions Mallory's children, discusses his wife Ruth just a bit, and completely avoids any question of his homosexual experimentation while at Cambridge (for that, see Gillman's excellent biography The Wildest Dream: The Biography of George Mallory). This book focuses more on Mallory's personality, his interactions with his friends, and his thinking. In many ways it is more of a character sketch than a traditional biography, and reads like a novel.

Reinhold Messner may be a mountaineering legend, but his account of Mallory's Everest expeditions of the 1920s misses the mark. He interweaves Mallory's letters and writings with fictional narration from Mallory's . . . ghost (?) commenting on controversies in modern climbing in a literary device that is jarring and at times even confusing. The real Mallory was far more eloquent than his spirit apparently is (perhaps his knack for catchy turns of phrase faded in the afterlife). This book is short, a quick read for those who want a brief synopsis of the expeditions, but there are many better books out there for those interested in this topic.

This is the book from the 2006 Harvard student plagiarism controversy. I was reminded of it with all the Fifty Shades drama.

This link gives some of the examples of the passages in question:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/23/students-novel-faces-plagiarism-controversy-beditors/

To be fair, I haven't read the book from which Viswanathan allegedly plagiarized, but at the time I remember thinking it seemed to be a case of one mediocre book with trite sentences copied from another. The book was eventually pulled from stores and destroyed.

I find it somewhat ironic that the examples of suspected plagiarism here are relatively subtle when compared to the similarities between Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight (there's a good example in this review). And yet Stephenie Meyer seems pretty unconcerned about it all.

Several years ago my husband and I went to a casino in the Bahamas. It was the first time I had ever set foot in a casino, and I didn’t play anything, but he played blackjack. He seemed confident about what he was doing, but when I asked him how he knew what to do, he was clearly just winging it. I was pretty suspicious of the whole thing, thinking that if the dealer always plays the same way, clearly there must be a correct strategy for the player. Of course, it turns out that there is. Out of curiosity I read this book, which explains the intricacies of the most common casino games.

This book is by no means some barely coherent get-rich-quick system like many gambling books. Brisman goes through the rules of each game in detail, but then gives the strategies and the math behind them. It’s actually a fun way to learn about probability and statistics, a lot more fun than counting black and white marbles or whatever it was my statistics textbook was always yammering about. There are plenty of equations here, but the explanations are simple and lucid for those who are intimidated by the math.

The chapter on blackjack is particularly good. I love how the statisticians who figured out the optimal strategy for blackjack (what is now called basic strategy) did it with plain old combinatorial analysis and then, back in 1956, published it in the Journal of the American Statistical Association (you can read the original paper here). The strategy has since been refined with computer simulation and modified for the changes in rules that the casinos have made over the years, but the concepts still stand. The American Mensa Guide gives you the strategy, but more importantly the reasoning behind it. It doesn’t take long to realize that most of the people who give you blackjack advice in a casino (including dealers) have no idea what they are talking about.

Humans are subject to a lot of fallacies when it comes to understanding probability, which helps casinos stay in business. A book like this is a reminder of how often we don’t intuitively come to the right mathematical decision. It’s not a bad thing to have a better understanding of concepts like odds, expectation, inference, and variance, not just to win (or lose less) at a casino, but to understand the barrage of statistical data we see every day. Sometimes information is deliberately misrepresented (I’m looking at you, Fox News), but often those presenting the data don’t have a good understanding of what they are trying to convey. Common sense can get you a long way, but it’s not always enough.