Daniel Tammet is a high functioning autistic savant. Similar to the main character from Rainmain, he can calculate huge sums in his head, tell you what day of the week you were born, and recite pi to 22,000 and something digits. Daniel wasn't diagnosed as autistic until late in life, which had him and his parents questioning some of his behaviour as a child. Daniel takes us through his life, how he sees words and numbers, how he functions in the world, and what has happened to him since people became aware of his condition and he was featured in a tv show.
Daniel himself says that he has trouble expressing his emotions and at times this comes across in the book. While describing his adult life, things are rather cold and it's hard to connect with what Daniel is saying. He goes on for pages and pages about language and how words are formed in different languages but it has absolutely nothing to do with him or his story. It's just him describing something, and is completely out of place in the book. These parts I found difficult to get through.
The most interesting part of the book was him describing his years as a child. He goes through all the troubles he had with social settings but also how much his parents loved and helped him.
Daniel seems like a pretty interesting guy. I found a TED talk of him and listened to most of it though it seemed like similar material from the book.
First Line: "I was born on January 31, 1979 - a Wednesday."
Rating:
(3.5/5)
From the blogger of 1000awesomethings.com, comes this book that talks, ad nauseam, of things that are AWESOME! This book can be fun when you digest it in small chunks. As gross as this is going to sound, it would actually make a good bathroom book. Do your business, read a few awesome things, and go on your merry way. This isn't the way I read it though, and about half way through just skipped the descriptions of items I wasn't that interested in.
Claire and her mother exchange notes on the refrigerator door because with their busy schedules that's sometimes the only way they can communicate. Claire is a typical teenager with boy troubles and her mom is a working single mother that's on call frequently as a doctor. At first the notes are trivial: groceries to get, allowance needed, don't forget your keys! Then they become more serious as Claire's mother learns she has cancer.
This book is described as "A little boy witnesses the ugliness of apartheid", which is as good of a description as I can give because it's a very short book and you sort of wonder where Courtenay is going with it since he has so little space. It's set in South Africa, on a farm when a boy is taken away from his mother once she comes down with malaria.
In the second novel of the Jack Reacher series, Reacher finds himself in Chicago, though not for long. He spots a woman on crutches struggling with her dry cleaning and attempts to help her out. The women ends up being an FBI agent, and daughter of a prominent member of government. Just as Reacher starts to help her, three men pop out of a car and abduct the two of them. Reacher and Holly get to know each other as they spend long days in the back of a truck, being transported away from Chicago.
When Molly passes away, her lovers meet at her funeral to remember. There's Clive, a composer that's currently working on a symphony, Vernon, a newspaper editor, and the disliked Garmony, an up-and-coming politician. Molly's husband finds photos of Garmony in compromising positions and hands them off to Vernon to publish them. Vernon doesn't really think twice but does get Clive's opinion. Clive doesn't agree that those photos should be published and the two fight. But Clive isn't lily-white either. While on a hike to clear his mind from his work, he witnessed a man attacking a woman and didn't do anything about it because he didn't want it to impact his work.
Rachel Sexton is a White House intelligence analyst who also has an estranged father running to become president. Her father has based his campaign on NASA over-spending and the need to privatize the space industry. Meanwhile, NASA is ready to come out with their most important announcement ever, something found up on the Milne ice shelf. Third parties have authenticated the find and Rachel is brought up to brief the White House staff. Rachel soon wonders if this is all too good to be true and whether NASA may have manufactured evidence to try to save themselves.
Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter extraordinaire is back for another round of crazy. Two bodies were found in the lot where Vinnie is building the new bond office after it blew up. It's not good for business so Stephanie tries to bring in the last few bonds before there's no business left. Given that she's a pretty bad bond enforcement officer, this doesn't work out too well and eventually, one of them is looking to kill her.
Fiona Cameron is a psychologist that uses data to come up with geographies and theories on crimes. The police regularly call on her for help, though with a recent rape and murder case decided to call one of Fiona's colleagues who ended up botching the case. Fiona vows that she won't work with the Met again. Except they need her help and she needs them when a killer starts to murder mystery writers. Fiona's boyfriend is a mystery writer and she wants to make sure the police catch the killer before anything happens to him.
A five year old girl is orphaned after an earthquake takes her family. Wandering, she escapes a cave lion attack and happens upon the cave people, who are searching for a new cave to live in after the earthquake collapsed their previous home. Iza, the medicine woman, wants to take the child in even though she's an Other, with light blonde hair. Brun, the leader of the tribe, reluctantly agrees but tells Iza she must teach the child the ways of the clan. Ayla, the child, is a free spirit and doesn't really understand the ways of the clan. She has problems conforming, which brings negative attention upon herself although Iza loves her like her own daughter. Broud, son of Brun, particularly hates Ayla because of all the attention she gets despite not being part of the clan.
Dr. Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist that splits her time between North Carolina and Quebec. In this novel, Tempe spends her time in Montreal, with three bodies of girls that were dumped in the basement of a pizza parlour and left there for years. Tempe eventually determines how old, how tall, and which race the girls are which takes them one step closer to finding out who these girls are. When Tempe doesn't get as much help from the detectives as she'd like, she starts to investigate things on her own with the help of her good friend Anne who is in town to take a break from her marriage.