Part of an Interactive Explorer series, this book is aimed at kids, and includes flaps, pull tabs, wheels and acetates. The book is divided into two, with Section 1 aimed at the weather. It covers weather extremes, changing climate, floods, droughts, winds, big storms, thunder and hail, and extreme snow.
What I Liked
I was mainly reviewing the text to see what they shared about space in Section 2 for younger grades. Overall, it covers the night sky, star maps, suns and stars, the life of a star, constellations, galaxies, planets, the moon, smaller bodies, and exploring space. All are good topics for those new to space.
What I Didn’t Like
The added features seem out of place in the book — the text is written for middle-school level or a bit below who would find the features childish, while the “features” are more suited to early grades who wouldn’t understand the text. For the space section, the order makes no sense. We start off with big areas, come into the sun, back out to stars and DSOs, back down to the solar system moon, and back out to small bodies.
The Bottom Line
Poor design and odd choice of organization for the space section
The book provides an overview of the first Tour de France after WWI.
What I Liked
I was skeptical when I first chose the book. It showed up as a recommendation in a feed, but was I really going to read about the Tour de France? I am NOT a giant sports fan in general, and certainly not of cycling, nor even of the TdF, although I’ve always been impressed by the idea of it. A gruelling multi-day race, different terrain, and extensive coverage are truly, ahem, impressive. But would I like a book about the first one after WWI? In a word, yes.
For the actual racing part, I loved the story. Bits and pieces were pulled from reports of the day, old interviews with various people involved, etc. A historian’s dream to take something that might have been somewhat dry at times for secondary sources and turn it into a fun read. I could feel the struggle when a tire went flat, or the weather intervened, or they were racing on crappy surfaces. I admired the commitment to even compete given the timeframe, as much about recreating the old life from before the war as about creating a new normal. I enjoyed the contrast of what some of the regions had experienced even a few months previously.
What I Didn’t Like
I was surprised there wasn’t a bit more information about the previous TdF. As I said, I’m not a cycling fanatic, don’t know the whole history, and there was very little concrete detail on what happened before the war. It seems like a strange omission to talk about “what’s new after the war” without saying what was “old before the war”. Heck, even which version of the race it was by year!
However, as much as I enjoyed seeing what happened in various regions during the war, the overviews of the regions were often way too long and disconnected from the story. They were decent summaries but they read like a history textbook. Not exactly riveting and the main reason I’m docking it a star.
This is a self-help guide to reducing your stress levels by choosing to care only about those things that are important to you.
What I Liked
I found this a very odd book to read. In almost every chapter, I found myself disagreeing with his evidence and examples, often thinking they proved the opposite of what he was trying to use them to prove, yet at the same time agreeing with some of the premises. It felt more like he had some solid ideas throughout, just not very well developed. Like, for instance, that we have limited bandwidth to care about things and therefore we should not care about a lot of unimportant stuff (hence the title), finding problems you like to solve (i.e., what you love), prioritizing better values for ourselves in line with what we love, and certainty being an enemy of growth (so you should risk failure more).
What I Didn’t Like
Most of his examples are Millenial-style rants, not actual evidence to support his arguments, and it is a lot of work to come to the familiar conclusion “don’t sweat the small stuff and it is all small stuff”, except with swearing.
The Bottom Line
Not worth reading but at least I got a reading badge for it.
This is the annual observer’s guide published by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.
What I Liked
Each year, the Observer’s Guide is produced and sold to amateur and professional astronomers across North America, and those astronomers vary considerably in their capacity and interests. It’s hard to serve any “one group”, but as I am at the intro stage to the hobby, I’ll review from that perspective. Some highlights include:
List of observatories, star parties, planetaria (pp 11-14);
Observable satellites of the planets (pp 25-26);
Observing artificial satellites (p 38);
Overview of filters (pp 64-67);
Deep-sky observing hints by Alan Dyer (pp 85-87);
Lunar observing (pp 158-161);
The brightest stars (pp 274-283, 285); and,
The deep sky (pp 307-337).
Of course, it also has the key reference materials:
The Moon (pp 148-157);
The Sun (pp 184-193);
Dwarf and minor planets (pp 241-251); and,
Double and multiple stars (pp 291-294, 296-297).
And it has specific highlights for the year:
The Sky month-by-month (pp 94-121);
Times of sunrise and sunset for 2019 (pp 205-207);
2019 transit of Mercury (pp 139-143);
The planets in 2019 (pp 211-229); and,
Comets in 2019 (p 264).
I’m happy too that some of the errors in URLs published last year have been corrected.
What I Didn’t Like
I still find the pages on telescope exit pupils (pp 50-53) to be incredibly dense. I keep meaning to find a more basic set of explanations online of it, but I never seem to get around to it. I would add the next section on magnification and contrast in deep sky observing (pp 54-57) as equally confusing. I have to believe that dense text can somehow be explained more easily to the newbie with some basic guidelines for common scopes and ages of users. Equally, I’m not thrilled with the astrophotography section (pp 91-93) which still lists the “big cameras” as best, in the same way that many photography websites ten years ago suggested that professionals would never go digital. There is an emerging market for people sharing prime shots they take with their smartphones — souvenir quality shots, not NASA shots — and it is almost completely ignored by the section (grudgingly it says “even cell phones”). I also find that the economic bias of last year towards higher-end binoculars and scopes continues. But those issues are mostly me just being picky — they aren’t enough to reduce the overall rating.
Disclosure
I received a copy of the guide as part of my annual membership in RASC.
Kottler reflects on literature and his personal experiences as a psychologist about the elements that lead people to not only make changes in their life but also sustain those changes over the long-term.
What I Liked
I had the pleasure of hearing Kottler speak as an honoured guest at my wife’s university graduation ceremony, and he intrigued me enough on the subject of “change” — what we know and what we don’t know — that I bought his book. It was the perfect book for me at this point in my life, as I’ve been wanting to make a significant change that has been holding me back for at least 30 years. I’m great at the day-to-day goal-setting stuff, but I needed to understand large-scale change on a deeper level, and this book was ideal for that education.
In the beginning, I was struck by a central question — when does an alteration in attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, thinking, or feeling “count” as change, and how long does it have to last in order to qualify? In shorter terms, when does a temporary change become permanent and sustainable? Chapter 2 was an eye-opener — hidden benefits from my current approach that resist change. Not the obvious ones but more internal ones that might even seem like positive traits in someone (being strong, standing up for oneself disguising some issues with temper, for instance). And some baby-step coping techniques. Chapter 3 dealt more with the conditions that allow you to transition from temporary to permanent change, almost pre-conditions in some cases.
Other chapters were relatively straight-forward: the power of story-telling (chapter 4); hitting bottom in various forms (chapter 5); how you react to trauma and whether it can be a positive catalyst (chapter 6); the limits to psychotherapy (chapter 7); change through physical travel or spiritual journeys (chapter 8); moments of clarity (chapter 9); and resolving conflicts in relationships (chapter 13). The last chapter — Why Changes Don’t Often Last (Chapter 14) — was the one that I was most looking forward to in the book, and while he goes into various spins and examples, most of it seems to come down to varying forms of fear. It certainly did for me, and I find the chapter fantastic for presenting it quite concisely. In the end, the price of the book is worth it just to get the 7 pages at the end, if you have time for nothing else (308-315).
I managed to use it to create a six-part “to do” list / game plan for the change that I’ve been wanting to make, and for the first time in my life, I’m doing it. I’m six months in and it seems to be holding. It’ll take another 18 months to “finish”, but the book helped me get there. Onward to the journey!
What I Didn’t Like
Several chapters didn’t really sing as well as the rest. Being happy (chapter 11) and transformation while helping others (12) were relatively bland, and a chapter on the importance of social capital (chapter 10) seemed almost like an afterthought.
The Bottom Line
It gave me the courage to get unstuck after 30 years.
