Mike's Books

  Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park #1) by   Michael Crichton   5 Stars   Michael Crichton has long been my favorite author, and I have been happily rereading all of his books recently.   A frequent theme in Crichton’s work is the idea of science and technology being misused, or at least not accorded the respect that they deserve, often with disastrous results.   Jurassic Park is probably the best known of those books and rereading it now in the time of COVID and climate change made me realize how timely some of Crichton’s ideas are.   The world is fighting a deadly virus that probably originated in a lab in Wuhan, China.   Scientists thought they could safely study the virus, but clearly they were wrong.   It got out, with disastrous results.   To paraphrase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park , life found a way.   Climate change, the idea that human activity is dramatically accelerating the pace of global warming, is another threat we hear about every day.   Decades ago we h

  The Cactus League by   Emily Nemens   2 Stars   I really wanted to like this book, but it just didn’t work for me.   The book is a series of related stories centered around a troubled baseball star during spring training in Arizona.   The book is billed as a novel, but each chapter is essentially a separate story centered around one character or group of characters that come together during spring training.   As a result, there’s very limited character development and little or no flow to the story.   The ending attempted to tie it all together, but it was extremely weak and disappointing.   And I guess that really sums up my impression of the book as a whole:   weak and disappointing. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45892265-the-cactus-league https://www.bookbub.com/books/the-cactus-league-by-emily-nemens