This slim volume features a selection of cover, trading card, and gallery art from DC Comics' now discontinued Vertigo imprint. A few of the series featured are ones I've read, albeit a very long time ago: Sandman, The Books of Magic, Black Orchid, Swamp Thing, Sandman Mystery Theatre. Most are series I've never heard of before, or heard of but never looked into enough to find out what they were about. I've been meaning to try Animal Man for ages, for example, but it still hasn't happened.

When I was in high school, I'd occasionally use my lunch period to go to a nearby comics shop and buy a few things. The store was arranged by publisher, with imprints getting their own subsections, and an odd "miscellaneous" section to catch anything by smaller publishers. I spent most of my time in the Marvel and "miscellaneous" sections (yay, Elfquest!), but my love of Neil Gaiman's Sandman prompted me to spend time in the Vertigo section as well. Although I never bought many Vertigo titles - I didn't have much money and didn't know which series I might like, and the store owner was so unwelcoming that I didn't dare ask him for recommendations - I loved the covers. They looked so different from the Marvel and other DC stuff.

I spotted this book during a shopping trip years ago and bought it with the intention of using it as artistic inspiration. Nothing ever came of that, but it was still nice looking at all the artwork and huge variety of styles. Each section has a little bit of text, normally something about the history of a particular series. Most of the artwork just has captions with the title and issue number if applicable, date, and artist, but a few include tidbits of info about the artists' style and, very occasionally, something about their technique or the medium used.

All in all, this is a nice collection of artwork. I wish there had been more text focused on particular pieces, though, and interviews with some of the artists would have been great.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

• THE HIDING PLACEDavid Bell
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Berkley (October 2, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 045123796X
• ISBN-13: 978-0451237965
• aslo on Kindle ASIN: B0083P4ANC and audiobook ASIN: B009SBIGSA

 

I must have changed my mind as to the who and what 3 or 4 times by the end of this book. David Bell's writing style is easy to read, so this I was able to get through this quickly, even while trying to not speed read and miss anything. I really enjoyed the main character, Janet's daughter. The main characters were developed well. I am looking forward to reading more of David Bell's writing.

******I received this book from a Goodread's first reads giveaway held by Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA)****

 

 

 

 

Taking it slow, he unleashes her sexuality and it quickly occurs to him that what started out as a bet for him has become something more. With their weekend nearly over, and her ex showing interest in this new confident version of Lauren, Linc will have to risk it all if he wants to win the game of love.

Learning Curves by Cathryn Fox
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Linc and Lauren fight like cats and dogs. Is it because she doth protest too much? Linc has always been suggestive, but now there is an option for them to be on the same page.

Lauren fights her attraction to her best friends boss the best way she can. Until he catches her doing something she could be fired for. Then he asks her to bet him and try to win. Is any bet where a billionaire involved a bad thing?

Linc and Lauren have sparks flying all around them when they are in the same room. No one else is fooled when they see them together. Such a great story and a super HEA!


***This ARC copy is given by Netgalley and its publisher for an honest review only.

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I definitely loved this book. The "blurb" got me interested and the book did not let down for me. The translation was well done (original was written in Hebrew). The copy I received was an uncorrected proof, but there was nothing that stood out other than the word the tilde was not over the n in the word Senor.  The story follows several generations of women, their husbands, and the trials they dealt with in the 1940's and later in Jerusalem. I loved the characters, the neighborhoods the different members of the family lived in, and cultures that were represented. A beautiful read and I would definitely recommend it to others.

I am warned that I should take this book with a pinch of salt, since Smoot may not be telling us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But dammit, I want to believe him. This is what science should be like: go out and look for the data, no matter what it costs you. At several points, you just can't help comparing him with Indiana Jones.

Smoot started off in the early 70s as a particle physicist, where the norm was already for people to work together in big teams. But he was ambitious, and thought he'd never get anywhere as an anonymous member of a giant collaboration. He looked around and got interested in observational cosmology, which was finally starting to take off. In particular, he was greatly influenced by Peebles's book on the subject. People had just found the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation - the faint radiation coming from all over the sky that was generally assumed to come from the Big Bang - but no one knew much about it. Peebles urged researchers to find out more.

Smoot started doing cosmology, though he didn't immediately get involved with the CMBR. His first project was an attempt to detect antimatter atoms in cosmic rays, which at the time was another hot topic: some people thought there was a lot of antimatter out there just waiting to be discovered. Maybe there were antimatter suns with antimatter planets orbiting them. (This is for example the premise of Jack Williamson's SF novel Seetee Ship). Now, it's hard to remember that it was ever more than science-fiction, but then it was taken seriously.

Smoot set out to look for antimatter in cosmic rays, flying experiments in balloons to get them high enough to have a chance of catching something. There were all sorts of exotic accidents. One balloon crashes on a farm in the Badlands, and they have to retrieve the tapes from the wreckage. At the end, they have tens of thousands of events recorded, and they analyze them all to try and figure out if they've found any antimatter. They can explain every event as normal, with one single exception; as far as they can see, it's possible that it's antimatter. But the odds are only three to one in their favor, so they decide to run a bunch more balloon experiments. They never find another possible antimatter event - so it's a negative result, but an interesting one which more or less refutes the idea that there are antimatter stars.

As you can see, Smoot is a careful guy who knows how to get things done. He then starts a new project which finally does get to looking at the CMBR; he wants to use it to establish a universal frame of reference, so that he can measure the absolute velocity of the Earth. Everyone tells him this can't be done, since it means measuring temperature differences in the CMBR of around a thousandth of a degree, and there is no way to fly the experiment. But Smoot has heard that old U-2 spy planes are possibly being made available for scientific research purposes, he works his connections, he persuades people to do the incredibly tricky engineering, and he gets data which indicates that the Earth's velocity (indeed, our galaxy's velocity) is far greater than it should be, which has many interesting consequences for cosmology. Unfortunately, skeptics argue that it could be a false signal, and the only way to find out is to redo the experiment in the Southern Hemisphere. He somehow ships everything down to Peru, bribes and wheedles his way into getting approval, and collects his data. It turns out that the signal is genuine.

I haven't even got to the COBE satellite mission, the high point of the book, but you get the picture. In a way, I don't care if Smoot is stretching the truth or exaggerating his role. I think people like him are essential when you have a new field that's just opening up; another example that springs to mind is Galileo, clearly one of his heroes. Smoot advanced the state of our understanding of the universe a great deal by being willing to do whatever it took to find answers to questions that many people thought were too difficult to investigate. He learned tricky theoretical ideas and turned them into concrete experiments, he put together crack teams of engineers and forced them to build devices with ridiculous levels of robustness and accuracy, he sat in budget meetings and persuaded people who didn't like him to give him money, and when necessary he went in person to the Amazon jungle or the South Pole to get the observations he needed.

And all the time, he was careful never to believe he'd found something when it was possible that all he had was wishful thinking. He tried his damnedest to eliminate uncertainties, and at one point towards the end of the COBE project he offered a substantial reward to any member of the team who could show why the current results were not correct. Maybe he wasn't 100% honest, but neither was Galileo. For my money, Smoot will go down in history as another truly first-rate experimental scientist.