Foster Me Up by Rhonda Zimmer

An autobiography about life going through foster care.

Rhonda is a friend of mine, so I can't be disinterested reviewing her autobiography!  I can say that this is a really unique perspective from someone inside and outside the foster care system.  Rhonda managed to beat the odds of a difficult youth bouncing from home to home and become a successful adult.  This book describes her childhood with her twin sister, alcoholic father and confused mother and how she managed to prevail against all of it.  This would be a quick and edifying read for someone interested in a uncensored look at the life of a teenager in foster care.

Dying to do Letterman, by Steve Mazan

Dying to do Letterman: turning someday into today, by Steve Mazan.  HCI, 2011.  244 pp.  978-0-7573-1627-2.

... in which Steve Mazan, stand-up comedian, learns that he may only have five years to live and sets off to achieve his life-long dream of performing a comedy routine on the Late Show with David Letterman.

This review is of a digital copy provided to me by the publisher via NetGalley.

Steve Mazan's biggest dream as a child was to become a stand-up comedian.  After serving in the Navy for several years and attending college, he was able to begin to pursue a career in comedy in San Francisco.  Just after his career started to take off, and months after meeting the girl of his dreams, Mazan received a cancer diagnosis that left him with anywhere from five to fifteen years left to live.  His biggest dream had always been to someday bring his jokes to the Late Show, as David Letterman had always been one of Mazan's biggest heroes.  With a dedicated team of colleagues, friends and family, Mazan begins his push to achieve his dream.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In which former Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells of her life in Somalia, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands.


Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Muslim family in Somalia. This book is about the craziness of her early life and her gradual escape from Islam as she matured and moved to the Netherlands as an adult. It's really fascinating and revealing. Ali definitely provides a view of Islam that is not espoused by the American Media, for example.

Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane

Riding Rockets is the memoirs of shuttle era astronaut, Mike Mullane. He completed three shuttle missions with NASA before retirement. This book describes his early life (driving him towards space) as well as adventures within NASA. This book will disabuse you of any idealistic misconceptions about the nature of astronauts. Similarly, Mullane disparages NASA's leadership and culture. You may finish this book with lessened faith in NASA's leadership.


A great deal of this book is devoted to Mullane's sense of humor, apparently shared by most other astronauts. They were rather crude, sexist, and hilarious. Lots of pranks and jokes. Most parts of this book were interspersed with his observations about the sexism in other astronauts, and his own waxing and waning sexism. I found it entertaining, but I found their sexism a little disappointing. I know, it's silly. But when you have heroes you want them to be perfect and heroic, right?

This book was strangely religious, although it had nothing to do with religion. Mullane is a Catholic, and the entire book was sort of written through a lens of Catholicism. It was all praying for this, and thanking god for that. It was very casual and not tendentious which I appreciated. Maybe I need to read more memoirs and autobiographies, because it seems really strange to me when religion is permeating a completely non-religious book! I guess it makes sense, that as a religious person he would write about his experiences in terms of religion.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in space or NASA. It really is an edifying book about NASA's culture. Very entertaining and insightful. It was a fast, fun read.

What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard Feynman

Oh Richard Feynman, the patron saint of scientists, engineers and nerds everywhere. Richard Feynman was a Manhattan project physicist during WWII, and later went on to teach and popularize physics. He was a weird, engaging character whose writing is some of the best on physics topics. What Do You Care What Other People Think? is random memoirs, written casually and charmingly along with a look at the Challenger space shuttle disaster.


If you are looking to read a biography of Feynman, or about his work on the Manhattan project this is not the right book. It is also not about science, in general, and won't teach you anything about physics. This book contains several shortish anecdotes Feynman recalls from his childhood on. They really are fairly random, and sort of highlight how Feynman thought and how much he thought of himself. Not that that is a bad thing when you are Richard Feynman!

Almost half the book is devoted to Feynman's role in a commission looking into the space shuttle Challenger disaster, which occurred 11 days after I was born, in January 1986. Feynman worked on the commission, was sort of a loose cannon as far as the commission's work went, and ended up writing his own little report on the disaster.

For me the most interesting (and depressing) part of this book was the ineptitude of NASA Feynman highlights in his Challenger section of the book. According to his research and interviews, NASA's engineers and astronauts were amazing, dedicated individuals whose insight into problems the shuttles may have been having was squashed, discouraged and hidden by NASA's management. Really depressing. I have no idea how contemporary NASA compares to late 1980s NASA, but I seriously hope that they took Feynman's words to heart and shaped up.

In summary, this book is equally divided into two halves containing charming anecdotes about how awesome Richard Feynman was and Feynman's analysis of the Challenger disaster. If you are interested in physics, NASA, or Feynman specifically this is a book you will probably enjoy. Otherwise, maybe not so relevant.

Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens

This book was a gigantic (422 page, in fact) disappointment. I found his other book "god is Not Great" (his capitalization choices) fairly interesting, and I had enjoyed some article-length things he has written. This book was so boring and pointless. It was over 400 pages of Hitchens engaging in solipsistic name dropping.


Literally page after page of this book was descriptions of how Hitchens knew important poets, future politicians or activists and how much they all loved him. Barf. I kept waiting for the part about name dropping to end, but it really didn't. It was like the entire point of the book was for Hitchens to set down in writing how he met all of these people, how important and awesome they were, and how much they adored him. Gag.

The interesting part was about his childhood. There were some brave revelations and relevant background information. As soon as the book got to his college days it stopped being deep or revealing and just seemed to be him making an unconvincing case for what a clever, important man he is. I have never been all about reading autobiographies, but I thought they were supposed to have insight and history that would be relevant for someone other than personal friends of the author.

So my advice is to not buy this book. Borrow it from someone who was dumb enough to buy it, and read the chapter titled "Mesopotamia from Both Sides". It starts on page 281. You're welcome. This chapter was about the current middle east situation and America's involvement. Hitchens does have some interesting things to say about the topic, and keeps the name dropping to an almost tolerable level in this chapter. Unless you really want to know about the parties Hitchens attended with various poets and activists you've probably never heard of, skip the rest.

Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi ali

This book is amazing. I think it appeals to be because of the beauty with which Hirsi Ali writes, and her openness and honesty about the incredible and horrifying events that have taken place in her life.


In Nomad, Hirsi Ali describes family members and some of her life experiences. The theme that held the book together, I felt, was her call to arms against the horrors of radical Islam and the ways in which she feels westerners ought to fight this cultural war that has already been started against us.

The stories are all discrete and short, more like anecdotes. She describes cousins, her grandmother, her siblings and parents. The one thing that they all share is the pain their Muslim religion brought them and their loved ones. I don't want to spoil the book, because everyone ought to read it, but the stories she recalls from her childhood in Africa and the Middle East are truly eye-opening and profoundly disturbing. Some of them make female genital mutilation seem innocuous. It isn't what you might expect, her account is far deeper than a list of complaints about gender inequality in the middle east, although it naturally comes up.

I must have closed the book and looked at her picture on the cover 50 times while reading the book. It continually amazed me that such an inwardly and outwardly beautiful person could grow out of so much abuse and depravity. At this point I should make it abundantly clear that she places the blame for the abuse she suffered during her life on Islam and the effects it has on its followers. She makes a highly convincing argument that we can't just stand back and watch Islam grow, watch it fight a cultural invasion against the west.

I think as soon as the term "cultural relativism" was defined for me back in college I realized it was a bad idea. I think that we can and should declare western culture and values to be superior to cultures in which rape is used as a weapon of war, children are prevented from obtaining and education or modern medicine is shunned, to name a few examples at random. If I had previously felt that different cultures ought to be respected even if I personally found their practices to be wrong, I am pretty sure this book would have convinced me otherwise. Despite the Hirsi Ali's remarkable success in life, no child should be subjected to the environment she was raised in.

In summary, read the book. It could change your life. It was a remarkable autobiography that was candid and beautifully written and its themes were ones which ought to be brought to America's attention. Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to make a donation to the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation and see about obtaining her other books, "Infidel" and "The Caged Virgin".