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Father and Son, by Larry Brown, Owl Books, 1997.
Larry Brown is the master of the raw and the sparse and of bringing Mississippi to the world in a language that is as stripped down and bare as Faulkner's is dense. Brown is at his best when he writes of the tensions between one screwed-up man and another, in this case a father and son. One has just been let out of prison, and he shouldn't have been. The other is drunk and disabled and intends on staying that way. To make things worse, there is a conflict with the sheriff, who is good and righteous but who tried to put the moves on the parolee's woman while he was in prison. To tell more would be to violate Brown's mastery of dialogue and of that which goes unspoken in this sly story of father, son, and misery.
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Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies, by Douglas Hofstadter, HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
Douglas Hofstadter, best known for his masterpiece Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, tackles the subject of artificial intelligence and machine learning in his thought-provoking work Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, written in conjunction with the Fluid Analogies Research Group at the University of Michigan. Driven to discover whether computers can be made to "think" like humans, Hofstadter and his colleagues created a variety of computer programs that extrapolate sequences, apply pattern-matching strategies, make analogies, and even act "creative." As always, Hofstadter's work requires devotion on the part of the reader, but rewards him with fascinating insights into the nature of both human and machine intelligence.
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Extreme Encounters, by Greg Emmanuel, Quirk Books, 2002.
After reading The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, did you ever wonder
what it's like to be struck by lightning? To run with the bulls in Pamplona?
To ride the crushing swell of an avalanche? Extreme Encounters describes these
adventures and 37 others with endlessly addictive "you-are-there" second-person
narratives-so you chill to the numbing effects of frostbite, you hear the 110-decibel
roar of a grizzly bear, and you feel the stomach-lurching drop of an elevator freefall.
Extreme Encounters is a moment-by-moment, blow-by-blow account of what happens to
you physically, emotionally, and scientifically during life's most perilous experiences.
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Contact, by Carl Sagan, Pocket, 1997.
It is December 1999, the dawn of the millennium, and a team of international scientists
is poised for the most fantastic adventure in human history. After years of scanning the
galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they've found a message
from an intelligent source--and they travel deep into space to meet it. Pulitzer Prize
winner Carl Sagan injects Contact, his prophetic adventure story, with scientific details
that make it utterly believable. It is a Cold War era novel that parlays the nuclear
paranoia of the time into exquisitely wrought tension among the various countries involved.
Sagan meditates on science, religion, and government--the elements that define society--and
looks to their impact on and role in the future. His ability to pack an exciting read with
such rich content is an unusual talent that makes Contact a modern sci-fi classic.
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It's Been a Good Life, by Isaac Asimov, Prometheus Books, 2002.
Isaac Asimov's boundless, inexhaustible intellectual curiosity and his extraordinary talent
for explaining complex subjects in clear, concise prose is logendary to readers throughout the
world. In addition to treating his devoted fans to nearly five hundred illuminating
science-fiction and nonfiction books, he also found time to write a three-column autobiography.
Now these volumes have been condensed into one by Asimov's wife, Janet, who also shares excerpts
from letters he wrote to her and shocking revelations about the illness that led to his death.
More than being just an absorbing history of Isaac Asimov's life, IT'S BEEN A GOOD LIFE is like
having an intimate conversation with the master himself.
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