Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black. What the heck was I thinking, grabbing this over 1000 page tome from the library shelf? Well, I had finished the biography on his successor (Truman) and I was a little curious about the man who Truman thought as enigmatic and privileged. All I knew about FDR was mostly from memorizing the "Alphabet Soup" of all his New Deal programs in high school history class. So far, I'm struck by the man's personal foibles--it makes him so much more human than the urbane glorification of a textbook mainly concerned with facts and figures. FDR was ambitious, maybe a little vindictive, and stoic to the point of machismo. Perhaps he loved Eleanor Roosevelt when he married her, but there was constant contention between two very different and independent personalities--and when you throw in FDR's domineering mother, meddling relatives, and questionable female companions, you're bound to get an explosion or two. I keep on wondering if Eleanor might have been better off if she had refused Roosevelt's marriage proposal (the first woman Roosevelt proposed to turned him down because she didn't want to be a "cow"--FDR wanted a really large family). Interesting, but very long. Hopefully I will be done with this book before the end of next week.
On Writing Well by William K. Zinsser. Unlike the above book, I have finished this one. There are a lot of good ideas, some of them (especially the more technical aspects) I've heard of before, but one point that I took away from it was the process before one starts writing. A topic has to be specific, but no one can tell you what to write about. That, you have to figure by yourself and sometimes it can be trial and error. Another point is simplicity and clarity, which is self-evident, but many times a writer forgets that the reader doesn't know the stuff the writer assumes they know. Zinsser also puts the emphasis on rewriting and rewriting again--I wonder what he would think about blog writing where the author just slaps on whatever is on his mind on the moment.
DNA: The Secret of Life by James D. Watson and Andrew Berry. A science textbook? Hardly. Watson guides the reader through the history of genetics and the birth of molecular biology in first person. But because this is first person, you have to be wary not to take everything on face value. It's exciting to read someone's inside view --from discovery of DNA structure to human genome sequencing--but then there are the ethical dilemmas that Watson also describes. He covers everything from genetically modified crops to genetic profiling. Certainly, these are important problems that we must consider, but are the opinions Watson offers really representative of the scientific community or just his own?
