Living near Minneapolis, Johnny Pepper is a young software engineer who gets a job at the high-tech Beamer Corporation. He can’t wait to do some actual software engineering, but is told to read manuals until the right project comes along. His office mate is Danny, a very cynical person who spends his days reading news items off the Internet to Johnny, despite Johnny’s absolute disinterest, and in gabbing with a woman named Fillmore. Needless to say, Danny does very little actual work.

After three months of reading about Beamer’s WebCutter software, Johnny gets to actual code writing, fixing bugs here, and plugging holes there. It gets to the point where Danny and Fillmore give their work to Johnny, so they can continue gabbing and not-working. Eventually, Johnny is given his own project, to be included in WebCutter’s next release. He works on it day and night for 5 full months; just when he is ready to hand in the finished product, he is told that it won’t be needed, after all.

Meantime, outside of Beamer, Johnny is dragged by his roommate to what turns out to be a Christian party. There, he meets Katya, an anarchist who works in the pharmaceutical business. They see each other for a while, but the relationship eventually fades away. It doesn’t help when Katya finds Johnny in bed with a woman from across the street, who is separated from her husband.

Because of these things, Johnny decides to write the ultimate in viruses to affect WebCutter. He spends a lot of time on it, makes it look like it came from Danny’s computer, and records the whole story to explain to Katya why he did it.

This is a really good satire on modern, high-tech office life. It’s a pretty "quiet" story, but, for anyone who has ever spent their days looking at pages and pages of computer code, it’s very much worth reading.

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Do you have a wildest dream or a lifelong goal? If cost was no object, what would you like to do with your life? Why don’t you start to do something about it? This does not mean abandoning your present life, all at once and starting over, but working, step by step, toward that Ultimate Goal.

No one can change the circumstances under which they came into this world; the only thing that can change is your attitude. Just because you weren’t born a rich, white male, blaming Them (whoever Them is) because you are poor, overweight or a minority is a waste of time and effort. If you want your situation to change, you are the only one who can do anything about it.

This book also looks at several aspects of life in today’s America that help keep the masses fat, lazy and dependent on the government. Some types of insurance are needed and a good idea, but most types are little more than a rip-off. Have you ever wondered why it is so easy to get into credit trouble, but almost impossible to get out of it? Many physical conditions can be improved, or actually cured, by a simple prescription: exercise and cut out the junk food. Joining a gym or buying one of those exercise devices shown on TV is not necessary; the first step is to shut off the TV (getting rid of the TV is a better idea), get out of your chair, and go for a walk.

If you are one of those who sit back and wait for Mr. Right (and Rich) to sweep you off your feet, and set you up for life, here is a news bulletin: women live longer than men. One day, hubby will be gone, either through death or divorce, and then where will you be? Don’t count on lifelong alimony that will cover all your expenses. Having lots of children just to get the child support money is a similarly bad idea.

The rest of this book consists of a workbook for the reader to track their progress, day by day, toward that Ultimate Goal. The process described in this book is not rocket science; it’s simple and easy to read. This book can be used by anyone, regardless of age or income. It’s recommended.

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Today’s supermarkets intentionally place popular items, like milk and bread, as far from the entrance as possible. That way, the shopper must pass all those impulse items at the end of each aisle. Also, they are subjected to muzak tracks that will cause them to ignore their shopping lists and stay longer. Have you ever heard of the Gruen Transfer? It describes the moment when a shopper loses control of the decision-making process, characterized by suggestibility and glazed eyes. It is at this time that a shopper is most likely to make an unplanned purchase.

At the local sports stadium, is there any surface, except for the player’s uniforms and the field itself, that doesn’t have a corporate logo? You have probably seen Video News Releases, slick corporate promotions and government messages designed to look like news, even if you have never heard of them. The book also looks at how to engineer public opinion, through front groups, paid experts and targeted messages.

Ebay has said that will ignore their own privacy policy if law enforcement is looking for information on a specific person, and hand over that information without a court order. Everyone is familiar with cookies, spam and spyware on your computer. Not everyone knows that Kazaa software embeds extra, hard-to-find, programs on your computer. They send information on your viewing habits to third-party servers. Advertising and subliminal messages are among the newest trends in computer games. This book also includes a list of actual patents for inventions that involve "regulated subconscious behavioral control by invisible means."

This is a first-rate gem of a book. It is really easy to read. While some might consider the information in this book common knowledge, it is still a rather spooky look at how well They have gotten inside our heads. It is very much recommended.

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One day, in his early teens, Joe gathers up some jugs to hold what comes out of the family still, a popular pastime. The only way to determine if a jug is empty or full is to blow across the top of it, which Joe demonstrates for Doc, who is totally blown away. To make noise from a jug is easy, but the breath control and lung power to make music come out of a jug, which Joe has plenty of, is a gift right from God.

At the local county fair, the jug band led by a man named Bug-Eye seems to have a lock on the title of Best Band. That is, until Doc’s band, with Joe on jug, takes the stage. After the thunderous applause subsides, Bug-Eye himself declares Doc’s band the winner. At the fair, Joe meets Florentine Sheppard, daughter of the local Parson. Many men have tried, and failed, to get her attention; now she only has eyes for Joe.

At a wedding celebration for one of Joe’s older sisters, he and Florentine are caught behind the barn doing something that certainly looks compromising. Parson Sheppard angrily forbids any further contact between them, and it takes Doc and Isabel a long time to calm down enough to even listen to Joe’s apologies.

A famous fiddle player, having heard about Joe’s talents, offers to take Joe on tour with him. Joe becomes a national celebrity and appears on all the talk shows (three Gold Records certainly don’t hurt). At the height of his popularity, during a home visit, Joe announces that he has joined the Army and will become a mechanic in Berlin. He meets President Reagan just before his famous speech in West Berlin. Having done his time, he comes home, but hasn’t lost his love for Florentine.

This is a very interesting story, told with humor and real emotion. The unique thing is that the book is written in "country speak"; if it was set in the South, I would say that it is written in a Southern accent. The upstate New York "accent" extends to the biography of the author in the back and the information on the copyright page. Get used to the flow and style of the story, and this is short, and really worth reading.

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Meantime, back at the friary, Brother Fidelis, the "boss" of the friary, has been spending a lot of time with a middle age woman new to the parish. When men become friars later in life, some are good at keeping their religious vows while others are not so good at it. By this time, Jerome has made a few visits back to the friary. He makes contact with one of the living friars, and is asked if he could possibly find himself inside the woman’s cottage while Fidelis is there; just for a peek, of course. He does, and finds a totally innocent scene of two people at lunch. Whether or not Jerome can be seen by the living friars on his walks around the friary seems to depend on the cat, Leo/Quant. A lot of things seem to depend on that dimension-hopping cat.

This is a very "quiet" novel (set at a friary, there will not be much in the way of action). It has little bits of weirdness here and there that will keep the reader interested. This belongs in that large gray area of Pretty Good or Worth Reading.

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Walter’s scores are nearly perfect, and, in the eyes of his peers, he changes from freeloader to VIP in the blink of an eye. When he gets to the place where he is supposed to declare his career choice, Walter refuses to participate, and walks out of the testing center. The next day, he is arrested, declared legally insane, and committed to a hospital called Tranquility (anyone with Walter’s scores who doesn’t choose a career has to be insane).

It’s the sort of place that will use any method to get what it wants. Walter does not intimidate easily. Whatever they can dish out, Walter can take, his resolve only getting stronger. At the end, Walter is forced to re-take the ASCAP test. Any difference in his test score from his previous test will give the authorities the legal sanction to execute Walter.

This novel also contains a re-telling of the story of Daedalus and Icarus, and the story of the Jesus Killer, a man who dresses like Jesus, and goes around killing people, in broad daylight, for seemingly no reason at all. This book is interesting, and different, and, in a world where standardized tests are an important part of a child’s education, very much worth reading.

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In the early part of the 20th Century, there were an entire generation of male geeks and outsiders who enjoyed reading this crazy literature called science fiction. Mainly Jewish, and usually living in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they combined their fantasies and youthful traumas into the square-jawed heroes who are now a central part of pop culture.

A central part of this book are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a couple of kids from Cleveland who created the first superhero, Superman. They learned, the hard way, that hard-nosed businessmen of questionable reputations, like pornographer and bootlegger Harry Donnenfeld, now ran the business. In the beginning, Siegel and Shuster signed away the rights to their creation (standard procedure). It took until the 1970s, just before the first Superman movie, for the pair to get official recognition, and something like a reasonable amount of money, for Superman.

The 1930s saw an explosion in comic book popularity. Even the shadiest, two-bit publisher could put out the worst schlock ever created, and it would be vacuumed up by the public. A seemingly infinite number of superheroes came before the public, teamed up with every other superhero, fighting any villain that could be put on paper. Some combinations worked, while others failed. Hitler and the Nazis provided a ready-made villain during the 1940s, which saw the public turn away from superheroes. Wartime paper restrictions put most publishers out of business; those that remained put out crime stories, westerns, and horror stories, to name a few. In the 1950s, Congress discovered the comic book. They were accused of corrupting America’s youth, especially the horror stories.

For the artists in the industry, working conditions were little better than a sweatshop. For instance, if 64 pages of material were due at the printer in three days, there was no possibility of leaving the office until those pages were done. With such time constraints, many details were left out of panels and chunks were taken from other stories, even if the two had nothing to do with each other.

This book is excellent. Anyone who has ever read an old superhero comic book, or a newer "independent" comic, should read this book. It’s also recommended for those interested in early 20th Century pop culture.

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A couple of times a week, Eddie beats Marci, and Corin, her younger sister, for some infraction, usually with his leather belt. It always occurs when Delia, their mother, isn’t home. Eddie always accuses the girls of lying, or says that he had to break up their fight, and Delia always believes him. During an argument, Eddie leaves the house, and doesn’t return. Delia is forced to get a job at the local Woolworth’s, and things settle down at home. Several months later, during which time he has been living with a woman named Wanda, Delia takes Eddie back, despite the girls’ pleading with her not to do so. The beatings resume.

Marci and Corin disown Eddie as their father, refusing to call him "Daddy" or "Father." With help from a neighbor, they tie him up and threaten him with a switchblade. Marci gets a book on karate from the local library, intending to learn some moves to use on Eddie. He resumes his relationship with Wanda; Delia will accept a lot of things, but she will not tolerate Eddie even looking at another woman. Marci borrows a camera from her Uncle Tommy, and sits across the street from a local bar, intending to get pictures of Eddie and Wanda together. Unintentionally, the pictures get into Delia’s hands, and then comes the "final" confrontation with Eddie.

This book is not just about domestic violence. Marci nearly gets thrown out of catechism class, for asking too many questions that eleven-year-olds shouldn’t ask. Her teacher, Miss Beauchamp, insists on speaking with a French accent, even though she is from Wisconsin. One day, at church, she sees Uncle Tommy and Father Chacon, the parish priest, come out of the same door in the confessional.

In a way, this book is not pleasant reading, but it is very good reading. The author does a fine job at "doing" a pre-teen Latina. This book could easily take place in any part of America. All in all, it’s very much worth reading.

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This is quite a book. It does a fine job looking at faith and religion for those who are not very religious. It has an interesting and plausible story, and is very much worth checking out.

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The trio that became Green Day grew up in small towns near San Francisco. Each coming from difficult family circumstances, they fell in love with punk music (the Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks, among many others). They formed a band, and soon became mainstays at a place called 924 Gilman. It was little more than a vacant building, but it quickly became a West Coast punk rock mecca. On any given night, veteran punk bands and bands playing their first gig would share the bill.

In the early days, Green Day was constantly on tour. They played basements, squats, anywhere they could plug in their instruments. Some nights, their audience might reach double digits, and other nights they might actually get paid for their efforts. They were living the punk rock lifestyle, fueled by large amounts of alcohol. They were loose and slacker-like about many things, but they were totally serious about their music.

Slowly but surely, they were building a fan base. Their first two albums, on a small punk label, did really well, eventually selling in the hundreds of thousands. Their first major label release, Dookie, in 1994, was a blockbuster, eventually selling 10 million copies. Marriage, fatherhood and burnout became a part of their lives, so they cut back on the incessant touring. But they were now filling major arenas. While some punk music can be indistinguishable from very loud, random noise, a big influence for Green Day was 1960s British bands, so there was actual music in their songs. In 2004, they released a concept album called American Idiot, another blockbuster and Grammy winner, giving their view of present-day America.

I really enjoyed reading this book. Of course, this book is highly recommended for those who own any of the band’s musical output. It is also recommended for anyone, yours truly included, who has seen a video or two of theirs on TV, but who knows little or nothing about punk music in general, or Green Day in particular.

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It sounds like a good thing for developing countries to put aside large tracts of land for "nature." Such a practice has now become required to receive Western aid. The poorer a country is, the more land they have to take out of production. How can a country dig itself out of poverty if large portions of their territory are no longer available for farming or livestock? To give one example of this new form of empire, 40 percent of the territory of Tanzania is now within strictly protected zones.

An extremely sophisticated radar system, called Have Stare, is being installed in Norway, its official purpose being to monitor space junk. Its actual purpose is as part of the Star Wars missile defense system. Ever since a passenger plane crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland, in the late 1980s, the whole world has blamed Libya. They recently "admitted" responsibility, even though the evidence to prove it was flimsy, at best.

If any one event can be said to have started "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, it was the shootings of more then 40 unarmed protesters by British troops in 1972 in Londonderry (Bloody Sunday). A government inquiry, which became dismissed as a whitewash, absolved the soldiers of responsibility, declaring that they fired in self-defense. An independent inquiry came to the conclusion that the protesters really were unarmed, and that the British troops fired first.

I totally enjoyed this book, and learned a lot from it, but I am something of a foreign politics lover. More than the usual amount of knowledge of world affairs would help when reading this book, but it is very highly recommended.

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Dick was born in 1928, near Berkeley, California, half of a set of twins. Evidently, his mother knew little or nothing about child rearing, because Jane, his twin, died at 6 weeks of age, possibly of starvation. Her death affected Dick for his entire life.

He was a big lover of classical music, and a voracious reader, especially of psychology, philosophy, and later in his life, religion. Dick never achieved his dream of becoming a "serious" novelist, though not for lack of effort. Writing science fiction simply paid the bills, until he became successful at it.

His first wife was a Communist sympathizer (having an FBI file in 1950s Berkeley was practically a badge of honor), he got his second wife sent to a mental hospital, and his third wife left him, and took their young daughter, when he objected to her getting a job outside the home. Dick had a fear of being alone. Dick was a paranoid agoraphobic who was subject to panic attacks. He was, shall we say, well acquainted with the world of prescription drugs, taking them for all sorts of physical and mental ailments. On speed, he could write a novel in two weeks, without sleeping, though he knew that he would physically pay for it later. In later years, he was perceived as some sort of LSD guru, even though he took it only once. There were a couple of stints in drug rehab.

As a youngster, during one of his rare trips to a movie theater, Dick was suddenly convinced that nothing existed outside the theater. The four walls and the pictures on the screen were the sum total of reality. Another time, he wondered if he was really alive, or if he was simply an android who was programmed with false memories so that he would think that he was alive. In later years, Dick turned a couple of innocent fan letters from Eastern Europe into a plot to get him behind the Iron Curtain, and keep him there.

Anyone who has ever read one of Dick’s novels, or seen one of the movies based on his stories, needs to read this book. For those not familiar with Philip Dick, read this as a look into the mind of a very strange person.

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No, Bayyumi’s immediate superiors do not suffer a series of mysterious "accidents." Every day at work, he is a very diligent employee, taking on extra duties whenever possible. He spends his nights living in a furnished room (the rest of his family is dead, either from violence or disease) reading subjects like law and poetry, to make him a more valued employee. He does not go to the cafes and nightclubs, but does allow himself a weekly visit to a female prostitute named Qadriyya.

As time goes on, and Bayyumi ascends the ladder, he realizes that having a wife might be a good idea. Through a local marriage broker, he meets Asila, a respectable woman in any sense of the term, but it does not work out. Later, he meets Onsiyya, a much younger female employee of his department. They see each other for a while, but Bayyumi emotionally pushes her away. On the spur of the moment, he marries Qadriyya, and they move into a flat together. Questions are being raised about Bayyumi’s lack of a life outside of work. The marriage is a disaster, as Qadriyya descends into a world of opium and alcohol.

Years later, with his hair turning gray, and the Director-Generalship in sight, Bayyumi marries a young woman named Radiya. He suffers a severe medical problem (heart attack?) for which the diagnosis is absolute bed rest. Will Bayyumi fulfill his life’s ambition, and become Director-General?

This is certainly a quiet book, but a really good book. Mahfouz does a fine job turning a normal human emotion like ambition into some sort of all-encompassing religious quest. It is very much worth reading.

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They have lived for centuries in a wondrous house with one hundred chimneys. Some members of the family are the sort who sleep during the day, in beds with lids. The house is being readied for Homecoming, that time when all the far-flung family members get together.

They arrive in all sorts of forms; humanoid, animal, spirit. There’s Uncle Einar and his wings. A Thousand Times Great Grandmere is the family matriarch. She has not exactly lived, but existed, since the time of the Pharaohs. Cousin Cecy is able to enter the mind of any mammal, human or animal, even at great distances. She takes four male cousins along for a joy ride into the minds of patients at an insane asylum. While they are gone, the bodies of the male cousins are destroyed in a fire. Now what? Then there is Timothy, the "normal" one of the family. He was literally left on the doorstep in a blanket. He is the only one of the family who will grow old and die.

There is a dark shadow over this Homecoming. The world is changing, and the family members are becoming less relevant. Many come from a time before Christianity, and are finding it hard to exist in this world.

In a way, this is typical Ray Bradbury. Set in rural America, this story is full of wonderful writing that is just weird enough, without going too far. This is highly recommended for everyone.

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