The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays by Max Black; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. One of the moderately interesting—and ultimately most annoying—things that one can do with a home computer is to put it into a GOTO loop. That is, a program is a series of steps. To make a loop, the final instruction...
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Initiate Abroad
A Little Tour in France by Henry James; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York Mark Twain was so disgusted by the superficial and sentimental nonsense in most American travel books that he said he wanted to eat “a tourist for breakfast.” But instead of devouring American tourists he delightfully caricatured their bungling stupidity, their romantic...
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The Reel World & the Real One
Robots: Facts Behind the Fiction by Michael Chester; Macmillan; New York. An associate, a PR representative for a leading manufacturer of industrial robots, did what fathers are want to do when their children come home from school with projects, in this case for a science fair: he gave his daughter some assistance. Given his vocational...
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Of Strife and Speeches
A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.; Little, Brown; Boston. On November 19, 1863, after Edward Everett had completed a now-forgotten oration of almost two hours at the dedication of a national cemetery on one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battlefields, Abraham Lincoln rose to deliver “a few remarks.”...
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From Berlin to Beruit
In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. According to numerous speculative historians and novelists, Hitler did not die in a Berlin bunker almost 40 years ago. He escaped, they theorize, to Brazil—or Argentina, or Paraguay, or New Mexico, or the South Pacific. Explaining away the remains medically identified as...