Literate Scientist

I own the other square box book “The Art of Looking Sideways”. This is how I noticed the bigger square box book in a local bookshop. My art education was very weak and I decided to buy the book. Later I also bought the portable “The Story of Art” from the same publisher. 

“30,000 Years of Art” contains pictures and reproductions of 1,000 artistic works arranged by time. I consider it also as a color complement to Ideas book. Now I read 10 pages every evening before going to sleep. Highly recommended to get the sense of history right. For example, before reading this book I had the impression that before 2,000 BC the art was at the level of cave paintings and venuses, but that level was actually long time before.

30,000 Years of Art

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It is interesting to compare core school subjects in 70-80s USSR with those in UK and Ireland. I certainly missed any religious education and many art-isms. Physical education (games) was also different except football and climbing a rope. So I bought this book in a local bookshop a few months ago to align my basic school education and finished reading yesterday while waiting in a queue in Irish visa office near Dublin O’Connell Bridge:

Homework for Grown-ups: Everything You Learnt at School…and Promptly Forgot

It was also useful for me to learn some English words from basic biology, classics and geography.

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I bought this book a month ago when I was browsing the list of new books on Amazon and was intrigued by title description. I also don’t know much about population genetics, anthropology and this is another reason why I’m reading this book now.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

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I bought this book in a local bookshop yesterday and just started reading it, considering it as a structured idea-centered overview compliment to a history-centered idea development book I’m finishing soon: Ideas and Modern Mind (Modern Mind is still on my reading list):

Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century

- Dmitry Vostokov @ LiterateScientist.com -

I bought this book in a local bookshop just before finishing Young Stalin and started reading it 2 weeks ago. I must say it is a breathless read. I’m very curious about the real story of communism in Russia and other countries because I only remember official USSR communist party interpretation from my school years in 80s. In Moscow University we also had a subject called the History of Communist Party of the Soviet Union (KPSS) and the textbook was called “kirpich” (a brick).

Comrades: Communism: A World History

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I bought a handsome hardcover Richard Evans’s Third Reich history trilogy recently and started reading the first volume in parallel to Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History. I would say it is a very smooth historical narrative, in a simple and clear language and it is very detailed and not Hitler-centered like Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. It has plenty of maps and this is very important to me because I can’t always recall where a rive or a region is located. Looking forward to reading next volumes when I finish this one. I put a link to the paperback edition of the first volume here because bounded hardback trilogy is very expensive and hard to find:

The Coming of the Third Reich

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Interested in Stalin and Stalinism since Perestroika I bought this as a hardback as soon as it were published and then last year I got the same book in paperback as a present. The pressure of two books forced me to make a decision to start reading and now I’m more than two-thirds through it. I must say this is a very interested read. In Russia, during Brezhnev era, before Perestroika, I only heard whispers about Stalin epoch and, of course, didn’t now anything about Stalin youth and his involvement in the revolution, for example, the fact that most of all officials in 1917 - 1953 were his friends and acquaintances, and historical and personal factors that contributed to the development of Terror, like Conspiratia, banditry and murky world of double Okhrana agents. I also have the book by the same author “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” that seems to be the follow-up although was written published earlier and I’m looking forward to reading it as soon as I finish “Young Stalin” book.

Young Stalin (Vintage)

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This book I bought some time ago to learn more about biology. I’ve just finished it and found it very good explaining what the science is, what is the difference between physical and life sciences. It also provides great overview of the subject, its history and philosophy, including taxonomy, evolution, ecology and ethics. I now adapt some ideas from biology to the science of memory dump analysis. There are some structural book organization deficiencies that would have made the book better. There are notes and the end of the book but I would prefer to have them to be footnotes. Also there is a very useful glossary at the end of the book too but for the beginner in any science it is useful to have definitions in footnotes ready to read when they are first encountered.

This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World

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Because I plan my own engineering autobiography I now started reading various biographies and autobiographies to see what people write there. This month I started reading the biography of P. A. M. Dirac. I usually read a chapter or two during my lunch time and so far progressed to the page 184. The book is very interesting and I’m looking forward for the next lunch to read next chapter every day.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius

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I encounter plenty of references to theology and its terminology in many books. My atheistic school education in communist Russia resulted in the lack of any knowledge of religion that I noted already in the review of Breaking the Spell book. A few months ago I saw this book in a local bookshop and immediately bought it to widen my views on religious and theological matters. I’ve read it and it explained lots of terminology very clearly. Highly recommended. One cautious note though: it only surveys key ideas and theologians from Western theology. For Orthodox worldview you need to look elsewhere.

A Brief History of Theology: From the New Testament to Feminist Theology

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