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Dawn of Modern Science, by Thomas Goldstein (1980)
This is a bad book written by a bad person. I should have yeeted it after the introduction, where he starts by talking about how he had always mistrusted science. "To my essentially romantic soul science seemed the great destroyer, Siva, the unfeeling foe of scenic beauty and poetic simplicity" and ends by thanking "a long line of charming young ladies" who typed up his manuscript pages.
Ostensibly a history of the origins of modern science, this book rarely manages to discuss science of any sort. It faffs around with art and architecture of the Renaissance and occasionally waves at something science related if you squint hard. Some few nuggets of information appear to fall into the book by accident, such as that da Vinci's notebooks contain some noodling "The Sun does not move" that indicate thoughts about a heliocentric universe a few decades before De Rev. To polish things off, the author takes an interesting swipe at the hardheaded rational scientists of yore:
"modern science has come around to accept some curious phenomena [that would have been laughed at by older scientists] but Medieval mystics might have accommodated without any difficulty at all: the manifestations of extrasensory perception, ... perhaps even the collective unconsciousness of Jung"
The Human Division by John Scalzi
The fifth book in the Old Man's War series, which recently won a Best Series Hugo. This was my first foray into the series, and it stands up well on its own without any prior knowledge. It shows some evidence of its origins having been serialized in a baker's dozen of pieces before being fully stitched together into a novel, but that doesn't detract. Or maybe one drawback -- one episode reads as very joke-y and the tone is off from the rest of the narrative. Given the general milieu of diplomatic shenanigans amongst Terrans, Offworld Terrans, and various alien factions, that one episode comes off as a regrettable Keith Laumer Retief story, while the rest is like some very good Retief, with additional space opera goodness. I liked it.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
A strange Hunger Games of necromancers in a futuristic-ish fantasy setting. I liked it but didn't love it. It starts off with too many characters, but this at least is rectified by them getting killed off mysteriously and magically. The central antagonism between our protagonist and her partner (and just about everyone else, really) is good for random bitchy talk, but doesn't earn the payoff the book wants.
This is a bad book written by a bad person. I should have yeeted it after the introduction, where he starts by talking about how he had always mistrusted science. "To my essentially romantic soul science seemed the great destroyer, Siva, the unfeeling foe of scenic beauty and poetic simplicity" and ends by thanking "a long line of charming young ladies" who typed up his manuscript pages.
Ostensibly a history of the origins of modern science, this book rarely manages to discuss science of any sort. It faffs around with art and architecture of the Renaissance and occasionally waves at something science related if you squint hard. Some few nuggets of information appear to fall into the book by accident, such as that da Vinci's notebooks contain some noodling "The Sun does not move" that indicate thoughts about a heliocentric universe a few decades before De Rev. To polish things off, the author takes an interesting swipe at the hardheaded rational scientists of yore:
"modern science has come around to accept some curious phenomena [that would have been laughed at by older scientists] but Medieval mystics might have accommodated without any difficulty at all: the manifestations of extrasensory perception, ... perhaps even the collective unconsciousness of Jung"
The Human Division by John Scalzi
The fifth book in the Old Man's War series, which recently won a Best Series Hugo. This was my first foray into the series, and it stands up well on its own without any prior knowledge. It shows some evidence of its origins having been serialized in a baker's dozen of pieces before being fully stitched together into a novel, but that doesn't detract. Or maybe one drawback -- one episode reads as very joke-y and the tone is off from the rest of the narrative. Given the general milieu of diplomatic shenanigans amongst Terrans, Offworld Terrans, and various alien factions, that one episode comes off as a regrettable Keith Laumer Retief story, while the rest is like some very good Retief, with additional space opera goodness. I liked it.
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
A strange Hunger Games of necromancers in a futuristic-ish fantasy setting. I liked it but didn't love it. It starts off with too many characters, but this at least is rectified by them getting killed off mysteriously and magically. The central antagonism between our protagonist and her partner (and just about everyone else, really) is good for random bitchy talk, but doesn't earn the payoff the book wants.
I’m guessing here and you can yell at me in a year if I’m wrong but I think it’s likely we see some pairing back of the cap – maybe raising it to $20K instead of $10K, or abolishing it for some lower-income taxpayers rather than everyone – in the big fight over taxes we’re expecting in Congress in 2025. Democrats will be reluctant to go too far, however, because a lot of economists say upper-income households would benefit most from repealing the cap.