Not sure how I feel about this.   Very Christian, a little judgmental and not really my thing.   But well written, with some spectacularly funny moments.    Not my usual reading, but this was a gift.

Scott Stoddard is an American graduate student who has been accepted into a prestigious program in Switzerland. On his way overseas, Scott is introduced to the enigmatic Countess de Rovere and becomes infatuated. With a promise to his parents to focus on his studies, Scott puts off calling on the Countess and attempts to concentrate on school and girls his own age. However, the pull of the Countess' presence is hard to resist and Scott finds himself under Desiree's spell. Scott and Desiree find that their attraction is mutual, even though there is a long list of reasons that they should not be together. Being introduced into Desiree's social circle takes a toll on Scott's academics, but their attraction grows. As news of their relationship spreads, pressure mounts on the couple. 

An Improbable Pairing takes the reader through the whirlwind romance of a very lucky American student and a privileged Countess in 1960's Europe. The beginning of the book grabbed my attention with the voyage, the mystery surrounding The Countess and the suspense of how Scott and Desiree would come together. After Scott arrived, the pace slowed a bit as he went about being a student and attempting to date the girls he believed he should. Things began to pick up again when Scott and Desiree begin dating. At this point, it also seemed like Scott was just the luckiest man alive as everything fell perfectly into place for him. Desiree's world is shiny and exciting as her status invites her into world's that I would never be able to see. The descriptions of luxurious homes, clothing, jewelry, restaurants, food and events were very encompassing and detailed allowing me to richly imagine places in Switzerland and France that I will never see. The romance plays out as I would expect, the addition of Desiree's ex-husband adds a slight tension, but could have been used to ramp up the excitement even more. Overalll, a classic historical romance that add the glamour of 1960's Europe. 


This book was received for free in return for an honest review.

This book is as improbable as the title suggests but is all the more fun because of it.

Set in Vanadium, a town built around a worked-out uranium mine in South West Colorado, "Improbable Fortunes" tells the story of a likeable, impeccably honest, and almost unbelievably naïve, ranch hand called Buster,

The story opens with a dramatic and slightly zany disaster, involving a mud slide a destroyed luxury ranch house that is, for some reason, full of cattle, a damsel in distress and Buster, apparently to blame for it all.

Most of the rest of the book is spent recounting Buster's progress towards this event from his birth onwards.

Abandoned at birth, Buster is raised by a variety of foster parents who gift him, almost accidentally, with a wide range of skills that will become useful to him in later life

The families that Buster lives with each has something odd about them and each suffers an unexpected tragedy that soon gives Buster a reputation as Jonah or worse.

Buster is guided through his chaotic life by the local sheriff who acts as Buster's guardian angel for reasons that only become clear towards the end of the novel.

The sheriff, like many of the other characters, is a larger than life individual with complex, and sometimes concealed, motives for his actions.

Few people in this book, apart from Buster, are who they at first seem to be. The fates of the characters are as dramatic and as interwoven in surprising ways as those of characters in a Restoration Comedy.

Although many bad things are done by many bad people, some of whom are the same people you thought were good people, I was left with a persistent sense of optimism and hope.

“Improbable Fortunes” is the kind of book that you can only really get by reading it, not be reading about it. Even then, if you're like me, you'll be smiling, scratching your head and saying "I've no idea what just happened but I enjoyed it so much I want ti to happen again”.

I just love Alvarez. He did more to change my world view than almost any other living person. He opened my eyes (and countless other peoples') by providing for an explanation that transcended my ability to initially accept. Before his explanation for his comet, creationist roamed the earth, now they are rarer but unfortunately not extinct (sure in America they are about 45% creationist but they hide that fact from rational thinking beings. It used to be they were in your face, but seldom anymore). The understanding of the earth and human's place on it was remade because of that comet 66 million years ago for which he offered proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The pieces of the puzzle were put in place and the narrative was provided principally by Alvarez (and a few of his colleagues), and he knows way more about Geology and minerals than I'm capable of ever understanding. BTW, I give him a great compliment by providing the world as he saw it has a solution like a puzzle. It's possible the world has no structure (see Wittgenstein's Tractacus, e.g.).

But my gratitude does not make a great book. To make a great book tell me things I don't already know. I read all books and Great Course lectures with "Big History" in the title. I can't get enough on the topic. I'm always more interested in the universal rather than the particular. There's a story to be told about the universe as a whole and how there is this incredibly contingent and chaotic component that gets created from a recursive (a function that calls itself) algorithm (logos as John the Apostle would say).

There's hints of a great narrative within this book, but it never gets flushed out. The pieces that are needed in order to bake an apple pie from scratch (from Gods perspective) or end up creating you or me can not be easily created. The comet that destroyed the dinosaurs, the creation of the moon, the Alps as a barrier, the placement of the Ohio river, the 3 billion year journey from single cell to multi-cell, the acquisition of the mitochondria at some unknown time by an eukaryotic cell, everything has to be just right and all, as everything (within our universe), has to be because something caused it to be that way and the sensitivities due to initial conditions (chaos) made the prediction impossible. Laplace and his mechanistic universe with an all seeing and all knowing machine (God) would never really be able to predict it since it can never predict its own effect caused by its observing. All of those items are within this book, but only loosely cohesively.

The author mostly has just threads that could be tied together. Sometimes he sneaks into 'pernicious teleological' thinking by assuming the existence of something had a purpose in it of itself ("the hand is made for grabbing because it does it so well", not his example, of course, but he does seem to give too much credence to fine tuning). The contingent universe and the contingent making of an apple pie (illusion of "apple pie" is borrowed from Sagan) may not never be. I think the author clearly leans towards a contingent universe. His example of the failure of the Spanish Armada leads me to think that.

I was reluctant to read this book because I expected there would be little new in the book for me, and I was right. For all authors, assume your readers are interested in learning about the topic so much that they have already read books that cover the same kind of topics. Give me things I don't already know, or give me a narrative that ties the pieces together in such way that I've never had thought about it before. The author is infinitely smarter and wiser than me, but wow me with a narrative.

The most amazing thing about "Climbing Mount Improbable" is that it is an easy read.

 

Richard Dawkins had the talent in explaining things that he knew so well, in a storytelling way.

 

Chapter one Facing Mount Rushmore 

 

How we could usually tell what is made by nature and what is not. But sometimes, it is not the case as the natural progressions is so good that it almost looks like man-made.

 

Chapter Two Silken Fetters 

 

Using spider and spider-web designs in explaining how nature made very complicated things and it is how natural selection works. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdtYRJqNe9I

This is a 300 pages book and the first two chapters read like a breeze. 

 

Chapter 3 & 4 The Message from the Mountain and Getting off the Ground

 

The important trend of evolution is that it always progress forward. Even if there is clear advantage for going backward on the evolution design to gain more ground in the future, the body would not act this way. it would also improve the current stage and never go back on the design path even logically it would benefit it in the near future. 

 

Chapter 5 the forty-fold ath to enlightement 

 

the evolution of the eye and how different animals evolve different types of eyes.