What are we reading?

[Windigo]

Sick in bed reading. Instructions Manual for my Roku 3 Device.

[JasonPratt]

Does it detect squirrels?  >:D

[Windigo]

Does it detect squirrels?  >:D

No but it makes it easy to stream netflix

[BanzaiCat]

I found something called Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles for my Kindle for only 2.99. Admittedly I don't know as much about this battle as I'd like so I'll get to it when I finish the first book in the Constitution series.

[Greybriar]

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder

[Barthheart]

Just finished reading Little Wars by H.G. Wells, finally. Great little book and look at early wargaming, gentleman style. Would really like to find the spring fired cannons he used, or something like it available today, and give his game a try... complete rules in the book.

[Gusington]

About to start Life in a Medieval City by Joseph & Frances Gies.

[JasonPratt]

Finished Volume 5 of David Paulides' Missing 411, called "A Sobering Coincidence". A bit shorter at 363 pages, it still contains almost entirely new reports, with the usual brief comparisons to some past entries; plus a handful of prior cases re-classified and re-presented.

This volume practically counts as the first true sequel in the series, as Paulides shifts over to a new but overlapping topic, one he had intentionally left out before: cases of (mostly) college-age young professional and accomplished men disappearing and being found dead in water, usually although not always after drinking (and/or smoking weed). Although the concept of drunk young men dying in nearby water is so prevalent as to be stereotypical, these men (and two women) stand out for the cases being highly a-typical, with overlapping details similar to other disappearances and deaths in prior books -- one big difference being that only two men in the book seem to have survived the experience.

Paulides was convinced to start including drowning accounts in his lists (as long as they meet other criteria) after, during his research, chancing onto a reference to a forensic pathology casebook written by Professor D. Le Gilbertson and retired New York City Homicide Detective Kevin Gannon called Case Studies in Drowning Forensics. Despite the broad sounding title, the book focuses on fourteen case studies with similar motifs where subsequent cold-case analysis (in great forensic detail) suggests that the verdict of accidental drowning has, for various reasons, been misapplied to men who, on the scientific evidence, must have been abducted by unknown parties, kept alive for periods of up to a few weeks, then slain in somewhat unknown ways (in one case the body had been almost completely drained of fluid, even from in the eyeballs, by means the coroners and forensic pathologists could not detect) and placed in bodies of water so as to superficially mimic an accidental drowning. When Paulides read about the motifs surrounding their disappearance and subsequent dead recoveries, he realized he had come across many similar cases beyond the fourteen found by Gilbertson and Gannon; and reporting these becomes the core of Volume 5.

I do think Paulides may be mistaking detection characteristics for an abduction criteria that doesn't necessarily exist; a point I have occasionally thought in his previous volumes, too. There are reasons the cases stand out as not being easily, or at all, explicable: the men aren't depressed losers too dumb and too physically incompetent to survive, which makes their cases stand out; prior victims are also smart, competent, stable and talented people which makes their cases stand out -- or, they're medically and mentally challenged people which, in other ways, makes their cases stand out (because they couldn't be normally expected to do so-and-so or accomplish this-and-that.) By, naturally, focusing on examples where characteristics of the victims make clearer that they aren't (evidently) accidentally dying or getting radically lost, those characteristics naturally become a selection pattern; but not necessarily a selection by whatever agents or process is claiming their lives, rather a selection by Paulides which helps him detect aberrant cases.

I have noted in prior reviews that at some point David needs to spend a lot more time giving us 'control' examples: if a young man dies in water of normally explicable causes after getting drunk, how does that happen? -- what kind of usual characteristics can we expect, and what kind of unusual variance characteristics can we expect? If (to ref other books) a 2 year old is found 95% of the time downhill in mountainous terrain within 1.6 miles (or whatever the stat range was), what about the other 5%? What do normal exceptions to the rule, so to speak, normally look like?

This has not yet happened -- or not in his books. Maybe on the internet site, www.canammissing.com ?

[JasonPratt]

David and Ben Paulides produced a documentary film last year, which they're hoping will be picked up for distribution (don't think that's happened yet). Here's the trailer:

[Gusington]

Just started The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo Saxon England by Marc Morris.

[mirth]

Countdown to Pearl Harbor by Steve Twomey

[Staggerwing]

The Destroyermen book 1. Good first book, way less pulpy than the promo blurb sounds.

[trailrunner]

I just finished this book.  Good, broad view of some of the key factors in the allied victory in WW2.

[Hofstadter]

Metro 2033 by dmitriii glukhovskii in the original russian

[Gusington]

I gotta read Metro 2033 at an me point...

...also one of my favorite books ever was Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers - 25 years ago!!

Olde 💀