Charles Officer

I just finished A Fabulous Kingdom which was a SantaThing book. It is a very good and interesting look at the exploration of the Arctic from before the Vikings to today. It is only 240 pages long, so it is a good place to start to get a overview of the exploration in the Arctic. Afterwords one can pick what to read more about. I only have one fault with it. Knud Rasmussen isn't mentioned at all. His Fifth Thule expedition, on dogsledge from Greenland over arctic Northamerica to Siberia, should have been mentioned.… (meer)

Jake Page does a very good job of detailing the history of the 1811/1812 New Madrid, Missouri earthquakes. While the book doesn't spend a whole lot of time on contemporaneous accounts of the quake, it does delve into the history of both seismology and seismologists. An interesting amount of space is given to those who have (erroneously) tried to predict major earthquakes and the their inevitable comeuppances. After Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, this is another good book on the natural sciences. A quick and informative read.… (meer)