BOOK REPORTS--

American Tempest by Harlow Giles Unger

Sub-titled, "How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution", Unger's book will have you feeling like you are walking the streets of Boston in the mid 1700s.  It is a marvelously crafted portrayal of life in those years leading up to the Declaration of Independence.  You will learn there were many "tea parties".  You will feel like you are peeking over the shoulder of John Hancock or Ben Franklin or Paul Revere and their colleagues who incubated the birth of our nation.  This should be required reading for all students, in fact, all US citizens.


The General's Daughter by Nelson DeMille

Another outstanding novel by a favorite author.  The daughter in the title is the lead character; a vixen with a nuclear powered libido whose escapades involve a host of fellow officers at her Georgia army fort.  Eventually she is murdered and the heroes of the story, two military cops with the Army's elite undercover investigative unit, are embroiled in a whopper of a whodunit.  It's a hard-to-put-down read with a happy ending.  Thank you Mr. DeMille.


For the Love of Physics by Walter Lewin

Yup, this one is about "physics" the scientific, not the anatomical kind.  Dr. Lewin has been a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than 31 years and is the kind of teacher we all should dream about.  A photo on his book's cover is perfect; showing him swinging somewhat capsized in front of his classroom doing a very personal demonstration of a pendulum--and, in the process, teaching us about gravity and Newton's laws of motion.  Horray for Dr. Lewin and all teachers like him who bring passion to the learning process.

A Time for Patriots by Dale Brown

This story lands somewhere between being a primer for Civil Air Patrol cadets and a rewrite of a 1940s era script for a Sky King radio show with bushels of fictional, war fighting appliances.  Nevertheless, it was a quick read for the brain candy it mimicked.