Posts

Showing posts from August, 2020

A New Look at Arithmetic (Adler)

Image
A New Look at Arithmetic , by Irving Adler (1964) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) This was another math book removed from the libary of William E. Grady High School , which would have been disposed of by the Math Dept had I not rescued it. (Said rescue will likely end when scifi conventions start again, at which point, I will attempt to "pass it on.") It has diagrams by Ruth Adler. When I taught at Grady, the Math Coach was named Jill Adler. Had I read this book sooner, I might've inquired if she were related. You never know. I found this book amusing to begin with because it was geared to folks who needed to learn the "new math" of the 60s, as opposed to the new math of the past decade. The one reason that I was aware that there was new math in the 60s was because of a Tom Lehrer song. In any cas

Wolf's Empire: Gladiator (Christian and Buchanan)

Image
Wolf's Empire: Gladiator , by Claudia Christian and Morgan Grant Buchanan (2016) (Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.) In the spring of 2019, I attended a science-fiction convention, Heliosphere NY . The announcement for 2020 stated that Claudia Christian of Babylon 5 fame was going to be one of the two Author Guests of Honor the following year. I was unaware that she cowrote a book, but I immediately signed up for 2020 and put the book on reserve at the library. Fast forward a bunch of months, and the library deletes the request and says it doesn't have the book. A few months after that, Christian and Buchanan cancel because of a "scheduling conflict". Shortly after that, the con goes online because of the pandemic, and the library finds the book and sends it to my local branch. And then the libraries closed,