Reviews and Comments

Landscape Townscape is a coffee table book of 105 photos captured by Henri Cartier Bresson. Most of the photos were taken during 1940-1970s in Europe, USA, Japan, SE Asia and India. All the photos are in B&W, which is Henri's defacto medium. A majority of the photos seem to be taken with a wideangle lens, especially the landscape ones.

I've seen many of Henri's famous photos and know a bit about the man who essentially created photojournalism. But, this is the first proper compilation of his that I've got my hands on. The landscape photos all show a very keen eye for patterns and composition. In fact, every photo has so many composition elements captured beautifully right that it's a joy to study each one. Long stark shadows evoking feelings of decay and sadness are a repeating feature in a lot of these photos. The landscape photos are mostly bare of humans, who are traditionally Henri's popular subjects. But, people going about their everyday lives start to appear in the townscape photos. It's a testament to Henri's small camera (the legendary Leica he's known for) and quick eye-arm coordination to see photos where a certain moment has been captured. A moment (Henri calls it the decisive moment) so fleeting yet precious that one can only wonder how the hell Henri happened to be at precisely the right place at precisely the right time!

I highly recommend this book for all those interested in photography. The book is huge due to the large print of the photographs and is surely expensive. Just see if you can borrow it at your library. The book is full of some of Henri's most seminal works. The grainy faces and images are sure to remain etched in your memory. Every Bresson photo is such a joy to look at and study and it's sure to influence your photography the next time you put your eye to the viewfinder.

I guess I'm too old for Nancy Drew now, which I used to lap up while I was in high school. Having nothing else to do during my vacation I read this book anyway.

The Secret Of The Old Clock is the first Nancy Drew mystery. Both this and The Bungalow Mystery are pretty amateurish. The Mystery Of The 99 Steps is somewhat more interesting.

The book is authored by William Golding who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. It begins on a deserted island where a bunch of boys are stranded after a plane crash. Soon, Ralph emerges as a leader among them through a vote of hands. A fat smart kid nicknamed Piggy becomes his intellectual counsel. Together they think their situation over and decide that the boys need to keep a fire burning on the island so that they can be rescued by passing ships. Ralph also restores order by setting rules for discussion (using a white conch as the token), assigning boys to build shelters for resting and collecting food. But, there is a rebel in the midst named Jack who is jealous of Ralph's power. He prefers a dictatorial style of leadership. He soon starts drawing boys to his side by teaching them to hunt the pigs of the island for food. As the days go by, the chance of rescue wanes, Jack's power grows, Ralph loses support, the social order of the boys breaks down and the island slips into barbaric chaos.

On the surface, the book is a nice read of kids surviving on a deserted island. But, this is no book for kids. Below, it is a full blown allegory to the various forms of human nature, society, leadership and political formations. The boys start off with a system similar to democracy under Ralph. That slowly deteriorates to end up as dictatorship and brutality under Jack. This transition is in the exact opposite order of how humans evolved from cave dwelling brutes to civilized democracies. The last book I read with such a strong allegory was Life Of Pi. LOTF is a pretty small book and can be easily read in a day. This is an excellent read.

NASA has discovered a meteorite in an Arctic glacier which has fossils -- of extraterrestrial life forms! Thats the premise of the book Deception Point. This is Dan Brown's third book. The protagonists in the story are Rachel, an intelligence expert for the NRO and Tolland, an oceanographer. There is also Rachel's dad, a Presidential candidate who is hellbent on winning the Presidency by bringing to light the recent inefficiencies and failures of NASA. Rachel is requested to visit the Arctic to confirm the details about the meteorite. Could such extraterrestrial lifeforms have formed the origin of life on Earth? What Rachel discovers there casts a big doubt on all this.

The book is a good read. Much better than Brown's Digital Fortress. Much like his other books I've read, though the story is quite lame, he keeps throwing interesting tidbits that keeps me engaged.

The story is about a mysterious spacecraft found at the bottom of the Pacific. The Navy flies in a psychologist (Norman) and a team he has recommended (which includes a biologist, a physicist and a brilliant mathematician) to investigate it. They go down to the depths to live in a specially pressurized habitat. The spacecraft is indeed fabulous once they discover that is was built for space-time travel. Inside this craft they find a large sphere. They can't figure out what this sphere is meant for or its contents. They can't return to the surface too since a Pacific storm has now left them stranded with no surface support. As they race to find out the secret of the sphere, strange things start happening in the deep ocean around their habitat.

The Sphere is not a sci-fi novel, it is a psychological thriller. The mind games are real neat. There is lot of trivia bits about science which are interesting. The best is Ted's explanation of how gravity connects space and time together. He does it using a bowl of fruit! Sphere is a good read.

This is a book aimed mainly at the beginner-intermediate photographer. I simply loved the book and learnt a ton from it. Why? The book is focussed on explaining the 3 elements of the photographic triangle: aperture, shutter speed and light (ISO) and how they're related. This was perfect for me because I'm now at a stage where I can kind of compose photos, but have no idea what combination of the 3 photographic triangle settings will give the most creative exposure.

The book is just 160 pages and is composed of short chapters (each of just a couple of paragraphs) each dealing with specific details about the above. Every page is full of Peterson's photos which illustrate what he's trying to explain in that page. Also interesting is how Peterson gives the settings for that photo and even the backstory of how he did it. I loved everything -- the writing style of Peterson, his examples and explanations. I highly recommend this book. I know I'll be rereading this book soon.

The book which shares authoring credits of Linus Torvalds and reporter David Diamond is about the life of Linus and Linux. The writing is mostly by Linus in first person with some intermediate chapters by David Diamond to give sort of an outsider's view of Linus' life.

The book is mainly in 3 parts: Birth of a nerd, Birth of an operating system and King of the ball. I loved reading the first two parts where Linus talks about Finland, early life with his family, introduction to computers, birth of Linux at university, his lovelife(!), move to Transmeta and growth in popularity of Linux upto the time of the book's writing. The third part is where he gives his opinions about more serious stuff like IP, open source software and even delivers the Meaning Of Life! These are the chapters where he appears confused and ambiguous, almost like he was asked by the publishers to write something serious since he has really fooled around in the former parts.

Like the title, the book was fun to read. Linus's writing is full of analogies and many times self-deprecating. Thankfully for the non-tech readers he stops at the right point when delving into the technical details of operating systems, kernels etc. He comes across as someone who does something firstly because it is fun. Everything else is secondary. This applies to Linux too. That is the reason why he stays away from the GNU/Stallman/OSS politics. The book was written at the end of 2000, so not everything about Linux is right now as rosy at it is in the book (like Linux IPOs). After having read about the OS and the hacker behind it from a gazillion outside sources, it was still fun to get it all from the man himself.