NTMBookClub

This is the discussion site for the North Texas Mensa Eclectic Book Club.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

The selection for September will be Three Cups of Tea By Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

Jim Collier said...: A recommendation for October, '09:

Carl Sagan: A Life

by Keay Davidson.

Davidson wrote his bio in 1999 less than three years after Sagan's untimely death at sixty-two.

The subject will need no introduction to Mensans!

The narrative is fairly quick-paced, thorough and Davidson's probing review of Sagan's accomplishments and boners is elucidating. The text is 430 pages followed by copious notes and bibliography which with index run more than another hundred pages. I read it in about four days.

And not to dwell on boners: the author does make one or two glaring mistakes, referring for instance to Puerto Rico as "subtropical", but I considered them inconsequential. California is subtropical. Puerto Rico is tropical.

Jim Collier; 9:48 AM