Book Review: The Life We're Looking For by Andy Crouch

The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World by Andy Crouch

Modern conveniences have only gotten more and more convenient. We can communicate with almost anyone on the planet, and not just in text or on the phone but with live video. We can order food, drink, books, clothes, entertainment, gadgets, and anything else at the click of a button, often with the item arriving in a matter of hours, let alone days or weeks. The world is at our fingertips. 

And yet, there is a crisis of genuine contact between people. Text messages are notorious for being misinterpreted; even videos don't quite give us the same experience that we have when we meet in person. Convenience has come at a cost. Do you even make eye contact at checkout counters? Do you even see the same people at the same store? Do you even see them as people? Of course, the opposite is distressingly true--do others sees you as a person? A person is more than the spending power of their credit card or the entertainment value of their presence. What we learn in modern interactions is not knowing a person as a person. 

Andy Crouch looks at this dehumanizing quality of modern life and convincingly documents the ways that life has become less personal. Technology can do amazing things and can be helpful in certain ways, but the dominate tone is a false promise of fulfillment, fulfilling only basic needs and wants, not looking to deeper and more specifically human needs. Crouch provides ideas for how to counteract the numbing and isolating effects of our technologically-dominated world. 

He builds on ideas started two thousand years ago, when the Roman Empire was at its height of world domination. A new movement started, in homes and around tables, where everyone had equal dignity: the scholars, the government officials, the scribes, the slaves, the females. Christianity provided a sea change in human culture with its emphasis on human dignity and care for even the most marginalized and supposedly worthless members of society. While it seems that such a scheme is doomed to failure, look where the Roman empire is today (in history books and museums) and where Christians are (all over the world, in hospitals and hospices, in food banks and soup kitchens). Crouch recommends we build households, places where people of different stages and stations in life gather and truly live together. Some households only have family, but often people who are not blood relations live in common and still develop close bonds and give mutual support. These are communities like the early Christian communities, where people would gather to pray and eat and serve each other. Such a lifestyle is unglamorous and won't wind up in history books or museums, but it will last for generations to come and will make the world a better place.

This book is inspirational without being ham-fistedly religious. While referencing Christianity, Crouch does not argue that we depend on grace or supernatural interventions in order to heal the wounds in modern society. He is not telling anyone to go to church or to pray to God (he does not write about that). Crouch keeps it on a humanist level, even while acknowledging that the problems of hedonistic, materialistic culture are the results of serving Mammon, which Jesus claims in Matthew 6:24 is what you are serving if you aren't serving God. People need to make priorities and some priorities are better than others.

Highly recommended, and it's a quick read too!

SAMPLE QUOTE: "The privacy we cherish is constantly in danger of curdling into isolation." [p. 160]

The Laurel Oxbow

While it is claimed there are no natural lakes in Maryland, the body of water at the Oxbow Lake Nature Preserve in Laurel, Maryland, might beg to differ. 

One entrance to the park is on Oxbow Place. The entrance has a nice path and an interpretive sign that explains the history of the area dating back thousands of years. The natives traveled on the Little Patuxtent River (the nearby river from which the oxbow formed) and used the river for fishing. The surrounding area provided wood and stone as resources to those early natives.

Path into the park

The river, like all rivers, has a tendency to meander, sometimes leaving large curves like the letter U. Either through a flood or some other occurrence, these bends may get cut off when a channel connects the shorter, non-bent distance. Imagine a line drawn across the top of the U, leaving the lower part of the letter as a potential body of water. In this case, water drains into the Laurel Oxbow from the higher ground around it. That runoff water is stopped by a beaver dam at one end, creating some marshy land and a lake.

The Laurel Oxbow

When I visited, the area had torrential downpours the night before, so the water level was high. A measuring stick is visible along the trail and typically shows the water level around three feet. My picture shows it almost at six feet!

The depth measure

A close up!

As I walked the trail, there was a lot of amazing flora and fauna. I spotted a frog along the trail in the picture below. Can you spot him?

Where's the frog?

Close up to show the actual frog

I was drawn to the location by a geocache, In the Laurel Oxbow, which required me to take a picture at a certain point.

Proof of caching

The trail also showed evidence of beaver activity, which is only natural considering the dam.

The tree usually has bark all the way to the bottom, right?

I was a bit late to see the mountain laurel blossoms. Some were still on the trees but not in their full glory. They typically bloom in late May and I was there in early June.

Flowers everywhere!

Soil erosion left a lot of tree roots exposed along the trail. Here is a dramatic spot.

Could be creepy in the right circumstances

The trail was a lot of fun to walk along. I may drag the kids out later to see it. I am curious what it looks like with a normal level of water!

Book Review: Crimson Lotus by J. Arcudi et al.

Crimson Lotus story by John Arcudi, art by Mindy Lee, Colors by Michelle Madsen, and letters by Clem Robins

Crimson Lotus is a Lobster Johnson villain (so before Hellboy's time). Her story begins during the Russo-Japanese War when an ancient artifact (pre-historic, maybe even pre-earth) is found in Manchuria. Her family suffers greatly. Thirty years later, a pair of Japanese spies in occupied China search for the artifact. Crimson Lotus, along with her army of little, creepy monkeys, is also searching for the artifact. Magic and monkeys are a bad combination, especially with the Lotus bent on revenge!

The story moves along at a good pace after the various elements are put together (the opening is fairly convoluted). The action is fun though as an origin story it does not have a lot going for it. Crimson Lotus gets her origin in the first ten or fifteen pages then it's just a fun supernatural spy action story where the focus is on the spies, not on Crimson Lotus. I enjoyed reading this but probably won't read it again.

Mildly recommended.

Ice Cream Summer Part II

Part of an on-going series as we make home-made ice cream all summer long!

The first batch of ice cream on our second week was Whoppers ice cream. It's vanilla with the malted and chocolate-coated candy thrown in. The recipe in the book recommends crushing candy before putting it in, so I used our little food processor to turn the Whoppers into chunky powder. The Chop setting did the job I wanted--mostly powdered with some chunks that were no bigger than half a Whopper. I was not sure of a good method to crush Whoppers by hand (maybe in a zip-lock baggie and some sort of mallet?). The food processor was fast and easy to clean.

Best ingredient ever?

Inconveniently Whopper-shaped Whoppers

Cut down to size!

The ice cream itself came out well. I love Whoppers, so the flavor can't go wrong. For the next time, I might try malted milk powder and a sea salt chocolate bar that's been food-processed, maybe some caramel sauce too if I feel ambitious or adventurous. Did I say I have a sweet tooth? I can call it "Whoppers#notreallyWhoppers."

Finished product

The next experiment was making basic chocolate ice cream from the machine's recipe book. The ingredients are still simple but the process is a little more involved.

Not quite matching chocolate bars

I had to heat the milk till just bubbling. While that was heating up, I food-processed the chocolate bars (which I notice were only 3.5 ounces each, so they did not make the 8 ounce total for chocolate) with the sugar to get it mostly powdery.

A bit of the bubbly

Chocolate bars and sugar take up most of the space

Once the milk was hot enough, I mixed it into the food processor with the chocolate and sugar and did some more processing. Our food process turns out to be slightly too small for the job, we lost one or two tablespoons of milk chocolate due to overflow as the machine mixed. The chocolate/milk/sugar then went into a bigger bowl to cool down. Once it was back to room temperature, the heavy cream and vanilla went in and the whole bowl went to the fridge for thirty minutes of cooldown.

Doesn't look overloaded when it isn't mixing

Cool swirls in the midst of mixing

The last step was pouring the mixture into the machine and giving it the usual thirty minutes of processing. The results came out really well. The chocolate flavor wasn't too weak. I guess the name-brand chocolate's higher quality compensated for its lower quantity. Using the sea salt bar added a little extra salt which probably had an impact as well.

The kids asked for a slushie, which is something we can create in the ice cream maker. My daughter whipped up some homemade lemonade--lemon juice, water, and sugar. The machine's slushie instructions insisted that any juice, soda, or other beverage not be sugar free or else the results would be bad. The kids were happy with the results.

Adding lemon

Adding sugar

Adding to the machine

Slushie!

My daughter decided to make chocolate chip cookie dough as a snack for herself (she makes it without eggs, so it's okay). She made some extra for cookie dough ice cream. 

Five simple ingredients!

A California of Cookie Chunks

Unfortunately, the machine's freezer bowl did not get cold enough after the slushie experiment, resulting in liquidy ice cream with the chunks on the bottom. Curse you, gravity!

A smooth top

Nobody wants a chunky bottom

My wife remembered some advice from a cookbook about adding two tablespoons of alcohol and mixing every thirty minutes or so to remedy the situation. We dutifully added some vodka (the least flavorful option) and set a thirty minute timer. We repeated the process four or five times until the ice cream firmed up.

Chillin'

The results were popular in our house, though I think the cookie dough wasn't as satisfying as the stuff I've had in store-bought ice creams. Maybe it needs the eggs or some other secret ingredient? The chunks were suspended in the vanilla ice cream, so the alcohol trick worked. It was a bit tedious to keep restirring, though.

Movie Review: The Cat and the Canary (1927)

The Cat and the Canary (1927) directed by Paul Leni

Cyrus West owned a great mansion on the Hudson River and had a substantial estate to bequeath on his relatives. Unfortunately, most of them swarmed on him like cats on a canary so he left his will to be opened twenty years after his death. Five cousins and an aunt come on a dark night when the family lawyer will finally read the will. The mansion has the standard-issue spooky housekeeper (Martha Mattox) who lets people in and seems to know more than she's letting on. If things weren't stressful enough, someone has tampered with the documents and a lunatic has escaped from a nearby asylum and may be on the grounds or even in the house. The mansion has a lot of cobwebs and creepy hands reaching out from secret panels and doors.

As an "old dark house" thriller (quite possibly the first film version--this is from the silent era), the movie works well. The cast has plenty of people to suspect, a fine heroine (Laura La Plante), and a bumbling comic relief guy (Creighton Hale). The balance of scares and laughs is just right and the actors give good performances. The filmmakers managed to put a lot of cat and canary references in throughout.

Recommended.

Book Review: Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

In an attempt to make the best out of a team with an abysmally low budget for baseball players, Billy Beane looked for a new way to assess the talent of players hired by the Oakland Athletics. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked with Paul DePodesta, a Harvard graduate with no professional baseball experience. What DePodesta did have was a computer and lots of data. He did analysis on player performance, though he looked for statistics that were not considered most important in the "received wisdom" of baseball. He looked for players who were undervalued, either because of their appearance or their unorthodox play style. The real thing DePodesta looked for was results, even if a player had some other flaws that made them look undesirable to regular scouts. Then Billy used his ability as a wheeler-dealer to get inexpensive players who would improve the A's performance over the year. Once a player did work out and become a hotter commodity in the baseball market, Billy would trade him for another underrated talent. 

The book focuses mostly on Billy because he is a fascinating character. He started out as a baseball player with a lot of promise. His biggest enemy was himself--his lack of confidence would kick in as soon as something went wrong; his temper often got the better of him. He did not have much of a career as a player. He had a very unorthodox career as a general manager. He didn't watch the games because he would lose his objectivity. He'd get angry when things didn't go well and he'd take it out on the office furniture (so maybe he hadn't changed from his playing days). He did have confidence in the analytics and in his ability to make trades and choose players to draft. He became so good that other managers would get nervous as soon as he called with a new deal for a nobody.

The book also looks at other people, including eccentric players like Chad Bradford, a pitcher with a great record but an unorthodox throw and a desire to be anonymous, or Scott Hatteberg, a catcher who lost his ability to throw but was an ace hitter and became a solid first baseman. The book also looks at Bill James, who wrote a series of self-published (and eventually regularly published) books in the 1970s and 1980s gathering baseball statistics and commenting on what they meant for the game. He looked at statistics in unorthodox but very persuasive ways. James was the origin of Beane's and DePodesta's system. The characters are interesting and Lewis underlines their dramatic qualities.

The book ends on something of a tragic and cryptic note. Even though their statistical analysis had the Oakland A's performing well during the season, they never got anywhere when they made it to the playoffs. The author passes it off as a discrepancy between a statistically predictable 160-game season and a statistically unpredictable (because there isn't enough data) five-game series to make it to the next round of the playoffs. "Science will get you to the playoffs but luck is too much of a factor once you're there" is the implication. The numbers game doesn't work without enough numbers. This struck me as a cop-out. If you can figure out a science of the season, you can figure out a science of the post-season. Maybe a different shift in thinking is needed, one not so dependent on numbers, one that looks at hard to quantify factors like human psychology and the heightened environment of playoff season.

Slightly recommended--it is a fascinating read but not fully satisfying. 

 

Book Review: The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Stories by K. McDonald et al.

The Night Marchers and Other Oceanian Stories: A Cautionary Fables and Fairytales Book written and drawn by Kel McDonald and many others

Another set of regional tales is given graphical treatment (see here for Asian stories and here for African stories). This volume represent Oceana, though it's mostly Hawaii and the Philippines representing. As folk tales and legends, a lot of the same ground is covered as in other areas of the world--why certain animals behave the way they do, how people deal with the dead (who often still interact with the living), the uneasy relationship between humans and animals (often transforming into each other), the rewards for persevering in good actions, and the punishments for embracing vices like greed or power-mongering. 

The art and storytelling varies widely, with some simple stories featuring little dialog and simple drawings. Other stories are more complicated or more elaborate. The variety is refreshing and keeps things interesting. I liked the shark tales the most since I find sharks fascinating (and they don't appear in other mythologies). Volcano deities are cool too.

One of the story's text is written in Baybayin, an old Tagalog script. At the end of the story, a two-page primer teaches how to pronounce the script. That would be cool, except the words are Filipino, so readers still need to know Filipino to comprehend the text. Even without the words, I understood a turtle gets its shell and a lizard gets its comeuppance. 

Recommended.

TV Review: Moon Knight (2022)

Moon Knight (2022) adapted for television by Jeremy Slater from the comic by Doug Moench and Don Perlin

Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) is a lackluster British museum gift shop employee with an expertise in Egyptian mythology. His real problem is two-fold: blackouts that lead to bizarre circumstances and dreams that show a different life as an American soldier of fortune. He also has unsettling encounters with Harrow (Ethan Hawke), a man with some sort of connection to the Egyptian gods. Harrow is building a collection of disciples to enact whatever plan he has. Steven has a hard time keeping track of reality. Viewers quickly discover that his American version, Marc Spector, is sharing the body with Grant. Spector has a lot more ambition and drive. He is the avatar of Khonshu (voiced by F. Murray Abraham), a minor Egyptian deity obsessed with avenging people wronged in the middle of the night. If the wrongs happen during daytime, that's okay too. Spector transforms into Moon Knight, a cloaked superhero who rights wrongs, though mostly in this show he's fighting with Harrow and his minions.

The effort to navigate their dual lives and their conflicting goals make Steven and Marc interesting characters. Isaac gives a good performance, flipping between the characters with ease and making both of them sympathetic. The show uses reflections to show the other character trapped inside, giving the two personalities a way to dialog with each other. Harrow comes off as a less compelling character and only a mildly interesting villain. He wants to release a goddess who will punish evildoers before they even commit their crimes. Hawke tries to give Harrow some creepiness but it doesn't really work too often. 

The use of Egyptian mythology is uneven. The show starts acknowledging the basics and has mostly museum-type mythology, which does not get into a lot of detail. Then they go fully into it for the last half of the show, an unexpected and happy shift. Some bits worked less well than others because blending modern sensibilities with ancient mythology is tricky. The show became much more challenging to follow and think about, which I liked. 

The ending was a typical big battle. The show suffers from the worst post-credits sequence since Legion. That last scene presents a surprise twist that makes very little sense with the rest of the story and brought up the wrong sorts of questions a viewer wants to be left with.

Mildly recommended. 

Ice Cream Summer Part I

This is planned as an on-going series because we are going to make home-made ice cream all summer!

After the success of last summer's brownie-filled chocolate chip cookie experiment, I decided to have an even bigger, more ambitious summer project for the kids and me: home-made ice cream! My challenge to the kids was to come up with their own flavors. Since school was in its final week, I did some practice runs to get us started.

First, I stuck with the simple vanilla ice cream recipe that came with our ice cream maker. It would easily fit in the One Ingredient Challenge because it has heavy cream, whole milk, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract. It was easy to make.

Simple ingredients for a simple dessert

Everything combined!

Finished product

It came out fine. The ice cream was not thick and creamy but tasted okay. The book has a "deluxe" recipe that uses eggs, we may try that in the future. My daughter made little sugar cookies the next day to take into school. She had some leftovers and we made tiny ice cream sandwiches.

Yum!

My second experiment was strawberry ice cream which was a little more involved than the vanilla recipe. First, I had to macerate the strawberries. Macerating is, essentially, extracting the juice from the fruit. This recipe had me mixing sliced strawberries, sugar, and some lemon juice to start the maceration process. After two hours, I had the juice the recipe recommended.

Stewing (metaphorically) in their own juice (literally)

The recipe follows the vanilla paradigm, using the strawberry juice instead of the vanilla. In the last five minutes of mixing, I added the sliced strawberries so they would mix nicely with the rest of the ice cream.

Ingredient Mark II

The barely perceptible pink tint from the juice

Adding the strawberries did not enhance the color

The results were mixed. The color was barely pink, which I am okay with since we didn't use artificial enhancements of any kind. The strawberries came out icy after the mix was in the freezer overnight. They were a little too large as chunks and a little too solid to scoop easily (though our freezer is set colder than is optimal for ice cream). I might chop them up more after maceration and see if that fixes the problem (or maybe macerate them longer?). 

I combined the vanilla and the strawberry ice cream to show the contrasting colors.

You can sort of tell which is vanilla and which strawberry, right?

The final experiment of the week had me splitting a vanilla ice cream batch into two so we could add ingredients. My daughter wanted to make "Sea Food" which is vanilla with blue dye, Swedish fish, and gummi sharks. The results looked good.

Two sets of ingredients

Making vanilla blue

Fish in a turbulent sea

The other half of the batch was mixed with peanut M&Ms (the plain ones were sold out at the store!) and Reese's Pieces. The hand mixing was good but it looked like most of the candies went to the bottom. After scooping, it did not look so bad.

Mixing in the candies

The Sea Food flavor had the same problem as the strawberry ice cream--the fish were frozen solid and hard to chew. Too bad our freezer has other stuff than ice cream in it, huh? Chopping the fish up might help, though then we'd have to call the flavor "Chum." Not too appetizing. By contrast, the M&Ms and Reese's Pieces were easy to chew up in the ice cream. Peanuts and peanut butter must have a lower freezing point.

The M&M/Reese's flavor was my favorite this week.

I am looking forward to the weeks ahead!

Movie Review: Last Night in Soho (2021)

Last Night in Soho (2021) co-written and directed by Edgar Wright

Eloise (Thomasina McKenzie) is a small-town girl in love with the 1960s and fashion design. She's accepted at a prestigious design university in London and is excited to go live big-city life. College is not quite what she expected. Her roommate is overbearing and the party atmosphere of the dorm is too much for her. She finds a room-to-let with an old lady (Dianna Rigg) and things start to settle down. As Eloise sleeps one night, she has a vivid dream where she is Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer who moves to London in the 1960s and wants to break into the nightclub scene. Sandie is a bit more confident and free-spirited than Eloise. Sandie gets help from Jack (Matt Smith) who has worked with other girls on their careers. Jack is smitten with Sandie and they do some passionate making-out. Eloise wakes up with a hickey on her neck though happy about her encouraging dream. Her fellow students tease her a bit roughly. Eloise starts designing a dress that Sandie wore. Eloise has more dreams and follows Sandie's career, which becomes darker and much less happy. The psychological pressure and Eloise's highly-empathetic nature wear her down. Is she going crazy? Was there really a Sandie who lived in that room? And what about that sinister guy on the street (Terrence Stamp) who is giving Eloise too much attention?

The fish-out-of-water comedy set-up of the film quickly morphs into a more challenging psychological horror. Eloise lost her mother early and is haunted by memories of her, often seeing her mom in mirrors. In her dreams, Eloise shows up (mostly) as the reflection of Sandie, which starts as fun but becomes a lot more uncomfortable as Sandie's prospects and expectations changes. Eloise struggles with her identity and her place in the world, much like most university students. Some people are helpful to her but others are awful and she doesn't have enough life experience to sort things out, creating a lot of high drama and jeopardy for her. It's fascinating and hard to guess where it's going.

The movie is very creative visually. In addition to the thematic use of mirrors, it also takes full advantage of the 1960s fashions and club scenes. The color palette is very deliberate, sometimes imitating Vertigo. The movie is also very unnerving--I was worried about half-way through that this would be the "feel bad" movie of the year, much like 2019's Joker. The story comes to a satisfying conclusion for at least some of the characters.

Recommended.

Book Review: Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: Cold War Correspondent by Nathan Hale

Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales: Cold War Correspondent written and drawn by Nathan Hale

Marguerite Higgins, a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, covered the outbreak of the Korean War. She was a correspondent in World War II and witnessed the liberation of some of the concentration camps. Stationed in Tokyo, she and other correspondents flew over to Seoul as the North Korean army came pouring south. Many of her personal experiences are told, e.g. dealing with supportive and unsupportive military leadership (some didn't want her anywhere near combat). The battle scenes are exciting and frequent. This book only covers the first year of the war (1950), with the South Korean and American/UN forces pushed all the way back to the southern shore of the Korean Peninsula. General Douglas MacArthur executed a bold plan to retake the capital, launching an amphibious assault at Inchon, eighteen miles west of the capital.

As with all the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales books, this is introduced with a little comedy by American patriot (and narrator of the series) Nathan Hale and his executioners. Ms. Higgins takes over narrating duty since she is a reporter and it's a natural fit for her. Her real-life account is riveting. I learned a lot about the Korean War from this book even though it only covers a third of the war. As usual, there's a bibliography and some pictures of the real Higgins. The inside cover gives a map of Korea and explains the language changes by the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism that happened in 2000, when spellings changed, e.g. Inchon to Incheon and Pusan to Busan, among others. This book is a better text than a lot of textbooks!

Highly recommended.

Book Review: Isaac's Storm by Erik Larsen

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson

Erik Larson gives a riveting account of meteorologist Isaac Cline's life through the lens of the 1900 storm that nearly wiped Galveston, Texas, off the map. Meteorology is the big focus, especially on hurricane detection and survival. Larson gets into the history of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean going all the way back to Christopher Columbus. He gives a brief history of the barometer, a key tool for weather data collection and analysis. Larson comes back to Cline as he describes the nascent National Weather Service, from its training to its maneuverings in Washington's governmental bureaucracy. Cline was a star student and a bit full of himself, a reflection of the larger culture.

The late 1800s saw a flourishing of scientific endeavors and optimism. Many weather scientists were looking for "The Law of Storms," a way to predict hurricanes and other foul weather so as to prepare for their impact and avoid catastrophic losses. Knowledge gives power, or so the thinking went, which implied control or mastery, which isn't necessarily so. The hubris of the age led to the tragedy of Galveston, with six to ten thousand deaths and massive amounts of destruction on Galveston Island and mainland Texas. An interesting conflict was in Cuba, where the National Weather Service representatives felt they were in competition with a local observatory that was "less scientific" but more accurate (though often more bombastic) in forecasting storms. The NWS people used their government connections to cut off the locals' access to telegraph services, leaving the United States with only the NWS predictions. When the fateful storm came through Cuba, the NWS predicted that it would turn north and east toward Florida--that's the official story that went out. The locals predicted that it would go north and west toward Texas--but they could not tell the mainland. Galveston couldn't avoid the storm but they certainly could have been warned earlier.

Larson gives a lot of detail of Galveston, how the people were used to storms coming in and it was a booming town in competition with Houston for greatness. The people had a lot of pride and some ambition, so even if they got the warning maybe they would not have left in time. A lot of people (including Isaac Cline) thought their houses were safe enough to weather any storm. Cline's house was shorn off the island, leaving him and his family adrift as the hurricane raged on Saturday night, September 8, 1900. The details of the destruction and loss of life are heart-rending and vividly described. The horrible aftermath has less detail but wraps up the story. Cline was moved by NWS to New Orleans, which he saw negatively. A lot of the difficult people in the Weather Service were sent there, making it hard to manage and a virtual dead end for his career.

I found the writing uneven. Larson writes beautiful text and it is very evocative. But the theme of scientific hubris, the main focus of the first third of the book, mostly drops out in the last two-thirds as the storm hits. Plenty of action and drama takes over the narrative. Larson took a little more license than I was comfortable with as he describes the inner feelings and mindsets of the people. Big chunks read more like dramatic recreations than objective narratives of what actually happened. The historic records aren't as detailed as they are nowadays, especially with Isaac losing all his letters and writings with his house.

Mildly recommended.