Patti O'Shea's Blog

My latest audio book was How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown. This is non-fiction by an astronomer who played an instrumental role in Pluto being demoted from planet-hood.

The book’s focus is largely on the discovery of Eris, the "dwarf planet" that’s slightly bigger than Pluto, although it also spends time on earlier discoveries that Brown and his team made of other objects orbiting in the Kuiper Belt. The story culminates with how Pluto was voted out at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have an interest in astronomy and one of the grade school dreams was to be an astronomer one day. I even took an intro to astronomy class in college. I’ll confess that I didn’t like Pluto being demoted. Maybe Saturn and Neptune are my favorite planets, but hey, Pluto is pretty cool, right? How could they vote it out after all these years? But as I listened to the arguments against Pluto, well, they made sense. I wish they hadn’t, but there you go.

I found the book overall to be interesting. I enjoyed hearing about the discoveries of large objects in the Kuiper Belt and the stories behind them. I liked hearing about the steps the team went through to verify and study these objects before announcing them and the intrigue that surrounded the object nicknamed Santa added drama and a sense of indignation that another astronomer nefariously tried to steal the discovery from this team at Cal Tech.

But as fascinating as I found all the astronomy stuff to be, I can’t recommend the book wholeheartedly. Brown wasted a ton of space talking about his first child. Some sections of Lila talk went on so long, my eyes were rolling back into my head. If I wanted to hear baby/children stories, I would have bought a book about that topic. I wanted to hear astronomy. His editor should have done a hard pruning and encouraged him to write more about Eris or anything else associated with astronomy and much less "indulgent parent gushing over child" stuff. A little bit of personal information is fine, it makes the author more human, but the extended stretches of stories about how long Lila slept at night, how many times she ate, etc were not even remotely interesting. The biggest disadvantages to audio books is how hard it is to skip the tedious parts.

So if you’re interested in how Pluto was demoted, I’d recommend buying the paper version of this book for easy skipping of all the baby/child talk. Without that, there is a very interesting core that focused on astronomy and provided a compelling argument for tossing our ninth planet out of the classification.

A qualified thumbs up.

Super Freakonomics is the follow-up to Freakonomics. I’ll confess that I’ve never read the first book, but I did listen to the second book and loved it!

As a journalism major in college, I was required to take both macro and micro economics. I’d also had economics in high school, but none of the classes I’ve had was even half as entertaining as this book was. The book’s focus is on microeconomics and behavioral economics and looks at things like prostitution, how often doctors wash their hands, car seats, terrorism, and global warming.

Yes, definitely quite a wide variety of topics!

Everything was presented in such an interesting, entertaining manner that even topics I thought wouldn’t be particularly riveting, held my attention. One of the co-authors reads the book, and while this is not something I’m normally a fan of, it works here because he’s got a great voice and does just read the words. He performs them the way a good voice actor should.

One of the more interesting topics focused on crime and that incident in New York from the 1960s? 1970s? The one where the woman was stabbed to death in front of 15 or so witnesses and no one stepped in to help. Apparently, the account wasn’t entirely accurate and there are quotes and stuff from the people who lived there and people who investigated it after the fact.

The best part, though, of the entire book is the epilogue. They talk about a researcher who was working with monkeys and teaching them to use money. I was laughing quietly in my cube as I listened to this section and the ending of the book was great!

Highly recommended.

The first Susan Andersen book I ever read was Baby, I’m Yours and it made her a Must-Buy author for me.

Catherine is a twin–the responsible, sensible twin. The hero, Sam, is a bounty hunter who thinks Catherine is her sister and he’s taking her in. Via Greyhound because he’s short on cash. The heroine does everything she can to mess Sam up and slow him down. At least until feelings start to develop between them. Over the course of the story, Catherine learns to let loose a little and not try so hard to be nothing like her twin.

There’s also a secondary romance with the twin sister, Kaylee, who learns to be more responsible along the growth arc of her story. In all honesty, I skip the Kaylee stuff when I reread this book. The main romance between Catherine and Sam is just too awesome.

To say I loved this book would be understating things. I really loved it. Catherine is smart and she’s no one’s pushover. Throughout the book she goes toe-to-toe with Sam and frequently out-maneuvers him.

Sam is sexy and alpha and Catherine keeps him hopping. And frustrates him to no end, not just sexually either.

The book is light romantic suspense and has a lot of humor. I can’t think of anyone who does humor with suspense as well as Andersen does. This book is probably lighter on the suspense than some of her other books, but it doesn’t change how fantastic this story was. It’s a character-driven story and the hero and heroine are completely awesome.

Highly recommended.

Last week, I finished listening to a book by Steven Pinker The Better Angels of Our Nature. The subtitle for this book is Why Violence Has Declined.

I picked up the book on Audible and listened to it, which is a different experience than reading as I’m sure y’all know. My review is based on the audio book, not the paper version. I very much liked the narrator for the book, a big plus since it’s an extremely long book. The paper version is listed at 800 pages and the audio version had 5 parts. Most Audible books come in 2 parts.

The premise intrigued me when I saw it. Violence is declining? In many ways, the world seems more uncivilized now than it’s ever been. Right? But the author begins the book by explaining what everyday life was like in the past and what our ancestors considered normal.

Blood sports in ancient Rome–gladiators fighting to the death, starving animals set loose with Christians, two animals fighting to the death. Blood and circuses to use the term I’ve heard in my history classes. Torture was everyday practice in the medieval period and people turned out to watch. People cut off the noses of others and apparently this was quite common, as was stabbing people to death during a dinner. Burning accused witches. The Inquisition. Well, the list can go on and on and it did in the book. The author talks about the increased violence that began in the 1960s and continued into the early 1990s before reaching today.

The length of the book makes it impossible to summarize coherently and I didn’t make notes, but Pinker doesn’t offer predictions about the future. While he said things have been improving, events could send us back into higher level of violence.

Overall, I found the information and the way it was presented to be extremely accessible and interesting. There is one section that gets heavily into an explanation of statistics before presenting the actual data that got a little long, but it was brief. I also found the last few chapters to be dry as well and would have preferred it ended a bit earlier. The last chapter in particular where it’s primarily a summary of all the rest of the book was particularly hard for me to sit through.

Another caveat is that the author gets quite graphic about what routine torture was like in the medieval period, and with my squeamishness, I was forced to remove my ear buds a couple of times. Pinker explains that he goes into this level of detail because of the way the past frequently gets glossed over or sanitized.

And squeamish or not, I think he was right about that. We’ve all heard of the iron maiden and the rack and breaking people on the wheel, but I didn’t really give any real thought to these things being used on real, living people. I knew they had been, of course, but somehow in my brain, I disconnected the suffering/pain/death that these things caused from the devices themselves.

Pinker did a tremendous job using facts and figures to support his argument about the decline of violence. I didn’t agree with everything I heard and some of it bothered me or made me uncomfortable, but I was able to disagree with some things without it toppling the premise.

But you know what? This book really made me think and it made me look at events–both historical and more modern–from a different angle so I’m calling the time well spent. I like having my world view knocked askew and I liked the fact it made me mull over things I thought I knew. Maybe the best part, though, is that I was left feeling hopeful about the future of humans. Maybe things aren’t as bad as the media would have us believe after all.

Recommended, but be prepared to make a big time commitment.