If you remember 15 years of losing to the Dolphins in the Orange Bowl, you will love this book. If you enjoy reading about the history of the National Football League, you will enjoy this book. If you think the Patriots begin and end with Tom Brady, you may be disappointed. If you hate the Patriots, you will want to burn this book.

Jim Baker, a regular contributor to ESPN.com’s “Page 2″ and Bernard M. Corbett, author of The Only Game That Matters: The Harvard/Yale Rivalry compile the history of the New England Patriots franchise by using 10 key games as the tentpoles. Besides the game descriptions, the book is full of player recollections, trivia, and stats.

The Patriots started off as one of the top teams in the American Football League. Then the team’s success ebbed and flowed with an ownership that usually lacked the capital to compete. After a few years of turmoil in the front office, Robert Kraft positioned the team for its current run of success.

The authors interviewed dozens of players, including Raymond Berry, Troy Brown, Steve Grogan, John Hannah, Steve Nelson, Dante Scarnecchia, Patrick Sullivan, and the late Mosi Tatupu. Those interviews are added to add great color to the stories about the franchise and the individual games.

The team’s current success can be attributed to a strong owner, a great coach and a great quarterback. You will not find any meaningful quotes from those three in the book. Besides Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and Robert Kraft, Drew Bledsoe is also missing from the list of interviewees.

What are the ten games? Of course the three Super Bowl wins are in there. There is the win over the Giants in 2007 to go 18-0 in the regular season. You should buy the book and discover the six others.

The publisher was kind enough to send me a copy of this book for review.

One Heart Boston

All proceeds beyond the direct material costs, postage and applicable taxes from the sale of One Heart Boston merchandise will benefit The One Fund Boston, created to raise money to help those families most affected by the tragic events that unfolded during this year’s Boston Marathon.

It’s dated but I enjoyed the apocalyptic Lucifer’s Hammer. As the Hamner-Brown comet approaches Earth, politicians, criminals, journalists, and scientists deal with the anticipation of its passing and possible impact. That uncertainty is main stumbling point that dates the book 30 years after its publication.

It’s disconcerting to have part of the plot be reliant on the uncertainty of a big, bright comet hitting Earth. Today we enough space observation and computing power to calculate an object’s orbit. We are even tracking the orbit of near-miss asteroids for decades in the future to determine whether they will hit or miss. Then, while reading the book, a massive meteor hits Russia. So maybe…

One science aspect that does resonate is the perspective of the astronauts. They are trapped in the period between the end of the Apollo program and the start of the space shuttle program. They don’t have a ride into space, much like the astronauts of 2013.

Where the book succeeds in overcoming its 1980s roots is the sage of the survivors in Southern California. Everyone is clawing for survival and a few are thinking about how to rebuild civilization.

Living in the Northeast, I’ve been inundated with pictures from the blizzard. It may not have met the technical definition of a blizzard, but it was still one of the ten biggest winter storms to hit Boston in decades.

The central pressure of the storm fell to 971 millibars at 7 a.m. on February 9, a level usually recorded in category one hurricanes. Hurricane-force gusts were recorded in 12 locations, including 83 miles per hour at Cuttyhunk Island in Massachusetts and 82 mph in Westport, Connecticut.

The movie below shows the development of the storm over as captured by the GOES-13 (or GOES-East) geostationary weather satellite.  The time-lapse animation is made up of images taken every 15 minutes from 12:01 p.m. EST on February 7 to 11:15 a.m. on February 10. You can watch the weather front near the Great Lakes merge with a weather front moving up from the southeastern United States, colliding into one massive storm with the counter-clockwise rotation characteristic of a nor’easter.

The Goal

One of my recurring annual goals is to finish reading at least 26 books for the year. In 2012, I managed to finish 36. Although, 6 of those were lighter reads. So maybe I should discount those and bring it down to 30. In any event, I exceeded my goal. The full list is below.

Reviews

Some of the titles will look familiar since I gave them a longer write up here. I also mentioned a few on Wired.com’s GeekDad and on Compliance Building. There are links that will take you to my reviews.

GoodReads versus LibraryThing

I’m still tracking my books in two parallel systems. Library Thing has a superior platform for cataloging books. GoodReads has a better platform for interacting with other readers, sharing reviews, and sharing booklists. Each has their strengths and weaknesses. I’d like to jettison one of them to quit duplicating efforts. So far, neither one has made a compelling move to improve and elbow the other out of the way.

2012 Reading List

Title		Author	Rating
How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything		Dov Seidman	Review
Defending Jacob: A Novel		William Landay	Review
The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways		Earl Swift	Review
Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot		Joseph Cummins
A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five		George R.R. Martin
Why the Law Is So Perverse		Leo Katz	Review
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business		Charles Duhigg	Review
A Visit from the Goon Squad		Jennifer Egan
The Richer Sex: How the New Majority of Female Breadwinners Is Transforming Sex, Love and Family		Liza Mundy	Review
Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston		Michael Rawson	Review
The Walking Dead, Book 7		Robert Kirkman
Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War		Megan Kate Nelson
Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, Book 2)		Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, Book 3)		Suzanne Collins
Show Time		Phil Harvey	Review
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt		T.J. Stiles	Review
Cutting-Edge Cycling		Hunter Allen
Gone Girl		Gillian Flynn
Pines		Blake Crouch
Amazing Gracie: A Dog’s Tale		Dan Dye
The Age of Miracles		Karen Thompson Walker
Sharp Objects		Gillian Flynn
Already Gone		John Rector
Nine Steps to Sara		Lisa Olsen
The Walking Dead, Book 8		Robert Kirkman
The American Alpine Journal 2012		John III Harlin
Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author,Who Went in Search of Them		Donovan Hohn
Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End		Manel Loureiro
The Dead Room		Robert Ellis
Make Magic! Do Good!		Dallas Clayton	Review
xkcd: volume 0		Randall Munroe
Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection		Zach Weinersmith
The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable		James Owen Weatherall	Review
The Most Dangerous Game: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection		Zach Weinersmith
The Remaining		D.J. Molles
No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey		Scott Huler	Review

How meta: an odyssey exploring Homer’s The Odyssey. Scott Huler has a baby on the way and one last adventure in his soul. Picking up a copy of the epic poem, he connects with it in a way that he didn’t when he first read it decades earlier.

He sets off, travelling lightly and cheaply, to visit each of the main stops on Odysseus’s troubled journey home. Or at least the places that most closely resemble the mythological places.

In No Man’s Lands Huler sums up the lessons of The Odyssey: the perils of ambition, the emptiness of glory, the value of love, the failure of self-glory, and the importance of family. He learns to fully appreciate the central theme: the greatest adventures of all are the ones that bring us home to those we love.

The book is part travelogue and part critical reading of The Odyssey, with a mix of personal self-realization thrown. To me, the key signal of my enjoyment of this book is that it made we want to blow the dust off the edition of The Odyssey from my college days and really read it this time.

• Huler’s own photos of his journey
• What Scott brought back
• An illustrated map of his journey
• NPR commentary that started it all where Scott Huler officially gives up on Ulysses.

Nobody Liked Caroling With Yoda by Brian on Shoebox.

Joe McCarthy’s grandfather remembers when the Park “Hog” River used to run through downtown Hartford. But today, it’s gone. There are buildings where there used to be a river. Intrigued, Joe looked closer and found the river buried beneath the streets of Hartford.

Joe partnered with fellow artist Peter Albano to map the now underground river and to document their exploration of this underground ecosystem. To help fund their project I backed their Kickstarter project and took a ride with them on their exploration of the underground river.

Joe and Peter took me into this beast of a public works project. At its heart, it’s just a river. But it’s wrapped in thick concrete and studded with outlets and floodways.

I wrote more about the Hog River Revival and the trip on GeekDad: Paddling Underground: The Hog River Revival.

Artwork from their trips along the Hog River will be on exhibit at the Hartford Public Library’s ArtWalk: Peter Albano and Joe McCarthy: The Hog River Revival Collection. The free exhibition opens Friday, December 7 with a reception from 6:00 p.m.–8:00 p.m. and runs through January 20, 2013.

Dallas Clayton launched his writing/illustrating career with An Awesome Book! Now he is back with a bigger and more awesome book: Make Magic! Do Good! His new book is a collection of poems and illustrations.

An Awesome Book was a single poem joyfully illustrated by Clayton. Make Magic! Do Good! is full of dozens of his children’s poems with a single illustration. This turns out to be a great way for my kids to pick which poems they want to hear. As a I flip through the book they get drawn to the illustrations that most captures their mood.

My kids favorites: “Real Live Dragon”, “Robots”, and “The Unicorn Glade.” My favorite was “Xavier Xing Xu.” [He] was terribly blue/ that the number of/ x-fronted words was so few.

As with his previous series of Awesome books, each of these poems overflow with joy and optimism. They bring a smile to my face. The book is best summed up by the book jacket summary:

I wrote this book to remind you that
you’re magic.
You’re reading this.
You right now.
You here and you there.
You’re something special,
and I hope that someday
you get a chance
to make your own book
or paint your own picture
or build your own rocket ship
or find your own kind of happiness
and that you get a chance
to share it with the rest of us
just like I got a chance
to share my happiness
with you.

I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of the book from the publisher.

This first appeared in Wired.com’s GeekDad

Imagine a viral outbreak has occurred. It’s highly contagious and dangerous. It’s nicknamed the “Zombie Disease” because those killed by the disease seem to rise from the dead and prey upon the living. How will you survive? REI, the outdoor gear store, has put together a class to provide some advice for that scenario.

I took one of the classes and wrote about it in GeekDad: Lessons From a Zombie Preparedness Class