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John Elder Robison
John Elder RobisonRaising Cubby: A Memoir about Asperger's and Parenting
John Elder Robison, the bestselling author of Look Me in the Eye, a surprisingly funny and insightful memoir about growing up with Asperger's Syndrome before the condition was well-recognized, is back with another wry memoir, this one about raising a son with the same condition -- and knack for getting into trouble. The author lives with his wife and son in Amherst, Massachusetts. His company, J E Robison Service, repairs and restores fine European automobiles. Scroll down to see a few of Robison's favorite books.
You might have to be a geek to love this book, but I'm a geek, so that's OK. Wired magazine reporter Andrew Blum takes us on a fascinating journey through all the physical pieces that make the Internet we take for granted, including the local cable providers, the backbone services, the switching centers, and even the switches themselves -- refrigerator-sized machines that pass truly staggering amounts of data from one network to another and, eventually, on to you and me. If you ever wondered why an email from your friend in Boston was routed through Rotterdam or China, this book provides the answers. If you never wondered about questions like that this book will open your eyes. Either way, it's a winner.Buy Now
Davis is the former head of Arista records, the label that gave us some of the biggest names of two generations -- from Barry Manilow to Santana to Springsteen to Whitney Houston. I found his story fascinating because of my own connections to the music world of the seventies and eighties. One thing that really struck me was the lengths record companies went to when "making a hit" or breaking out a new artist in that era. Davis talks about personally calling Oprah and other talk show hosts to get his musicians on the air, and the challenges he faced matching up singers and songwriters to deliver the hits he is justifiably famous for. The other thing that struck me was how strange it was that the same record exec that produced Simon and Garfunkel could also produce Busta Rhymes and the artists from American Idol. But it's true.Buy Now
I love reading history, especially richly detailed accounts of little-known events that happened in the context of much larger stories. Patrick O'Donnell did an excellent job of researching a million little details for this book about one of the most important but previously untold stories of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) in Europe. OSS volunteers endured many hardships -- living off the land over winter in the Italian Alps, evading the ever-present Germans, and adapting to a totally different culture. Despite those challenges they succeeded. It makes me wonder if our ancestors were a tougher breed than we are.Buy Now
Have you ever wondered what it's like to live miles deep inside a cave, in places where light never shines? James Tabor takes us on the underworld equivalent of an Everest expedition, a fascinating quest to reach bottom in two cave systems, one in Mexico and another in the Republic of Georgia. The journey involves porters, support crews, tools called rebreathers, and subterranean camps where explorers live for weeks like moles. An excellent and quick read.Buy Now
In this book Ted Conover takes us on a journey across the country by train. Freight train. If you thought the hobo life was a thing of the past . . . think again. Ted wrote this book when he was in his early twenties -- the age my son is now, and the age when I had my great adventures with KISS and other bands. I guess that's the time we do things like this. It made me smile to read his accounts of sneaking into rail yards, climbing aboard trains, and settling into comfy freight cars, out of sight of the bulls (railroad police), not knowing where he'd end up or when he'd arrive. The characters he met on the road were the best part. This book takes you into a world everyone has heard of but few truly know. Buy Now
Alan Furst is, in my opinion, today's master of historical spy fiction. Like most of his books, this one is set in Europe in the days before everything exploded with the onset of World War II. Furst offers a vivid picture of how difficult life was in Europe in 1939. Books like this --even though they are fiction -- bring history alive with a richness of dialogue and detail in a way that conventional histories simply cannot do. Buy Now
