stop. start. stutter.

Friday brings us Books About Cool Topics. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: The NYC restaurant scene
The book: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

This is a little less academic than the previous two; I figured it was time for something lighter! This is Bourdain's memoir about life in the NYC restaurant scene, and it's great. Fascinating in places, disturbing in others, hysterical in yet others. If you're the type of person who can't stand thinking where your food comes from and what might have happened to it before it hits the table, you'll probably want to give this one a pass, but if you're down with the concept that we all eat a little dirt, this is a great book. It covers what goes on in the kitchen of restaurants, what drugs your chef has likely done this afternoon, the economics and basics of running a restaurant, how to deal with suppliers, and what not to order in the restaurant. (And why!)

Bourdain's got a light, deft prose style, but he doesn't hold back, either. In a lot of ways, he reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson (may he rest in peace, with booze and loose women). This is a great look into the food service industry, both good things and bad, and it's entertaining even as it's educational.

It's Friday, so it's time for this week's Books About Cool Topics installment. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The Topic: Religious history: specifically, the Council of Nicaea
The Book: When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome by Richard Rubenstein

The Council of Nicea -- which is actually the First Council of Nicaea; there were others, but this is the one people most often mean -- is the point at which Christianity truly started to be shaped and codified. Before Nicaea, there were a bunch of different ways of looking at God and Jesus and the meaning of both, and individual churches taught and believed the version that they thought was most appealing. Rubenstein brings us through the argument (which actually displays surprising similarity to an Internet flamewar, although slightly more bloody-minded) providing just the right level of detail, and -- as is very rare for a book on religion -- without giving away which side of the debate he comes down on.

More than that, though, Nicaea was the story of Arius and Athanasius, the two main voices on both sides of the Christological debate, and Rubenstein gives us an excellent look at both men, their histories, their backgrounds, and their motivations, reconstructing very vibrant pictures of the two men from what's available to us today. This is a really good history book, well-researched and eminently readable, and very approachable for the layperson.

(Those of you reading this via RSS might have gotten it earlier in the week -- mix-up with the post scheduling, which I am trying out in hopes it will make me, you know, post more regularly if I write them ahead of time all at once....)

So I'm enjoying my "log everything into GoodReads account" project (except when I'm not, but, well) -- but I'm only logging in new books (or books I reread since I started keeping track). So let's do books about cool topics that you don't learn about in high school. (Or at least, that I didn't learn about in my high school; your mileage may vary.) And to force myself to get into patterns and habits, I shall do them on Fridays.

Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.

Today: The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time by Keith Devlin.

I am one of those great tragedies; I am a lover of math (I can't call myself a mathematician) who suffers from medium-to-severe dyscalculia, which went undiagnosed the entire time I was in public education. (I thought everyone had trouble telling 42 and 24 apart. Or plus and minus. And don't get me started on phone numbers. Or division. Or greater than/less than.) I love math; I just can't do it without tears and swearing. (Concepts, fine. Abstracts, fine. Ideas, fine. Actual problems? I will shoot myself.)

This book tackles the seven Millennium Prize Problems, each of which carries a million-dollar bounty for a "solution". (Scare quotes are because some of the "problems" aren't so much equations to be solved as "dude, this works, but we don't know why it works.") Devlin does a great job of explaining what the problem is for all but the last two, which honestly can't be explained to a layperson (at least not without interpretive dance), but the best part of the book is the background grounding he provides for the mathematical leaps-of-glee he's about to get into.

I've had people try to Explain Math Shit to me before, and they have about a seventy percent chance of causing me to have a screaming nuclear meltdown, because they do it in the wrong way. But Devlin's good at it -- informative without being patronizing or condescending, the way so many specialists can be when they're talking about their specialty to a layperson. Devlin's not interested in proving that he knows what he's talking about; he wants you to see why Hey, Math Is Fucking Cool. And, you know, since math is fucking cool, it's a win/win situation.