My grandfather got me my well-worn edition of Our Oriental Heritage back in April 1999, from a used bookstore in Nyack, New York. Our Oriental Heritage was the first volume in what historian Will Durant thought would be a 5-volume survey of civilization called THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. It was published in 1935. I first…
If one were to peruse the list of books I have read since 1996, the first item of note might be the book that started it all, #1 on the list: From Earth to Heaven by Isaac Asimov. Why this book? Why the list? Why now? In other words, how did it all start? In…
April 6 marks a special anniversary for me. On April 6, 1996, I began to keep the diary which I still maintain today. Four years earlier, on April 6, 1992, Isaac Asimov died. The two events are most definitely related, as we shall see. Sometime in the early spring of 1994, while wandering through a…
What is the first book you remember? Pressed to answer this question, eyes traversing the tall silhouettes, pillars of the shelves in my office, thoughts spelunking into the increasingly shadowy regions of my early memory, I’d have to say that the first book I remember is Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You…
Where were you when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon? When John F. Kennedy was assassinated? When the first plane hit the World Trade Center? We have a knack for recalling our circumstances during world-shaking events. For me, I remember what I was reading. Perhaps it is simply a weird trick…
Some books are a call to action. Such was Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon. This book set me off on two paths of discovery: one on the U.S. space program before the space shuttle era; the other was one to see if I could be part of that program. It started with the HBO miniseries From…
I’m back from another recent jaunt to the future to scout out interesting books that will be hitting the shelves. One of the more exciting books that I’ve mentioned elsewhere is a new posthumous collection of essays by the late David McCullough called History Matters. I was delighted to see that Simon Winchester has a new book coming…
I am not a casual user of profanity, obscenity, or vulgarity. Despite being surrounded by people and media where casual use is de rigueur, I choose not to use it. It doesn’t bother me much when I hear it used, and I don’t mind it in TV shows and movies, although I appreciate the cleverness of…
Some books are like the pebbles that start an avalanche. John Adams by David McCullough was one such pebble for me. In the late spring of 2001, one could not walk into the Book Star near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards without seeing row after row of hardcover editions of John Adams arrayed at the front…
Software developers using lower-level languages sometimes resort to using a memory region known as a stack. A stack functions on a LIFO or last-in, first-out principle. You push something onto the stack, and then you push something else onto the stack, and you can’t get to the first thing until you pop the top thing…
“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” Stephen King wrote. When I was just a youngster, my mom would tell me that books can take you anywhere. Isaac Asimov talked about books being a form of telepathy, a kind of direct communication between the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader. Books can…
Recently, my dad asked me how it is I remember the details of the past so well. He was specifically referring to my memories of the Granada Hills branch of the L.A. Public Library that I recently described in my inaugural Shelf-Life post. I can’t really explain this, except to say, that is how my…