Category: book review

the (forty-)seven samurai (赤穂浪士)

During my vacations in Japan, I read the massive (1096p) book by Osaragi Jiro on the  Akō incident, with occidental title the 47 rōnins. Which I had bought in Paris before leaving. This is a romancized version of an historical event that took part in 1701 in the Genroku era. Where 47 rōnin (leaderless samurai) […]

el lector de cadaveres [book review]

El lector de cadaveres (the corpse reader) by Antonio Garrido (from Valencià) is an historical novel I picked before departing to Japan as the cover reminded me of van Gulik’s Judge Dee which I very enjoyed (until a terrible movie came out!). Although van Gulik apparently took the idea from a 18th-century Chinese detective crime […]

blackwing [book review]

Another fantasy series of the gritty type, maybe not up to the level of the first ground-breaking Abercrombie’s but definitely great!  With some reminiscence of Lawrence’s first series but with a better defined and more complex universe and a not so repulsive central character. Maybe even not repulsive at all when considered past and current […]

prime suspects [book review]

I was contacted by Princeton University Press to comment on the comic book/graphic novel Prime Suspects (The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations), by Andrew Granville (mathematician) & Jennifer Granville (writer), and Robert Lewis (illustrator), and they sent me the book. I am not a big fan of graphic book entries to mathematical even less than […]

the grey bastards [book review]

Another almost random read, The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French is a light (if gritty) fantasy book that should appeal to Warhammer players. Including the use of hogs as mounts. In that the main characters are half-orcs, in a Universe where lots of species (also found in Warhammer) co-exist, if not peacefully. The idea of […]

a hatchet job [book review]

By happenstance, I came across a rather savage review of John Hartigan’s Bayes Theory (1984) written by Bruce Hill in HASA, including the following slivers: “By and large this book is at its best in developing the mathematical consequences of the theory and at its worst when dealing with the underlying ideas and concepts, which […]

end of the game

While I have not watched a large part of the Game of Thrones episodes (apart from the first season I had time to follow while in the hospital), I decided to subscribe for one [free] month to OCS to get the last and final season [unlike a NYT critic who watches the entire eight seasons […]

Gene Wolf (1931-2019)

Just found out that the writer Gene Wolf, author of the unique New Sun series (and many other masterpieces) had passed away two weeks ago. (The Guardian has a detailed obituary covering his life and oeuvres. Where I learned that he developed the Pringle’s machine for Procter and Gamble, something he can be pardoned for […]

haunting of tramcar 105 [book review]

A mix of steampunk and urban magic in a enlightened 1912 Cairo sounded like a good prolegomena and I bought P. Djèli Clark’s The haunting of tram car 015 on this basis. As it happens, this is actually a novella of 123 pages building on the same universe as a previous work of the author, […]

the joy of stats [book review]

David Spiegelhalter‘s latest book, The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, has made it to Nature Book Review main entry this week. Under the title “the joy of stats”,  written by Evelyn Lamb, a freelance math and science writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. (I noticed that the book made it to Amazon […]

Отцы и дети [Fathers and Children]

Following a mention made of this book on the French National Public radio, I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for the first time last month. This is a fabulous novel, reflecting about the failed modernisation of Russia after the abolishing of serfdom and the rise of nihilism in the younger generation. Having re-read Dostoievski’s Demons […]

Lies sleeping [book review]

This is the seventh book in the Rivers of London series, by Ben Aaronovitch, which I have been expecting a long time. Avoiding the teasers like The Furthest Station, which appears primarily as a way to capitalise on readers’ impatience. And maybe due to this long wait or simply fatigue of the writer (or reader?!), […]

La peste et la vigne [book review]

During my trip to Cambodia, I read the second volume of this fantasy cycle in French. Which I liked almost as much as the first volume since the author continues to explore the mystery of the central character Syffe and its relations with some magical forces at play in his universe. As in most stories […]

sorcerer to the Crown [book review]

Sorcerer to the Crown is an historical fantasy book by Zen Cho I got into buying by reading a review linking most positively it to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Obviously I should have known better, given that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was several years in the making, with both a very convincing reconstitution […]

L’enfant de poussière [book review]

I read this book in French, as this was the language in which it was written and also because I was given a free copy for writing a review! This is a rather unusual book, the first volume of a series called the cycle of Syffe (where Syffe is both the main character and the […]

Computational Bayesian Statistics [book review]

This Cambridge University Press book by M. Antónia Amaral Turkman, Carlos Daniel Paulino, and Peter Müller is an enlarged translation of a set of lecture notes in Portuguese. (Warning: I have known Peter Müller from his PhD years in Purdue University and cannot pretend to perfect objectivity. For one thing, Peter once brought me frozen-solid […]

Ka [book review]

My last book of the year (2018), which I finished one hour before midnight, on 31 December! Ka is a book about a crow, or rather, a  Crow, Dar Oakley (or, in full, Dar of the Oak by the Lea), told from his viewpoint, and spanning all of Anthropocene, for Dar Oakley is immortal [sort […]

the beauty of maths in computer science [book review]

CRC Press sent me this book for review in CHANCE: Written by Jun Wu, “staff research scientist in Google who invented Google’s Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Web search algorithms”, and translated from the Chinese, 数学之美, originating from Google blog entries. (Meaning most references are pre-2010.) A large part of the book is about word processing and […]