The Curve of Binding Energy, by John McPhee

I was late to the sciences, struggling through basic requirements in high school and then completely ignoring them through college. After almost a decade in the working world I returned to school to become a physician. One of the premed requirements I had to take before even applying to medical school was physics - a counter intuitive exercise for me, at least in the beginning (a few early Saturdays were almost entirely spent trying to figure out the direction of forces, resultant acceleration, and so forth).  With time came a modicum of aptitude and I began to enjoy the subject - in particular, the section on subatomic particles. Rutgers (where I did my post baccalaureate premedical schooling) didn't go so for as to teach us how to build a nuclear reactor (or bomb, for that matter), and McPhee's book doesn't either, though it comes close. The book is really the story of Ted Taylor, a nuclear physicist of note who worked with the biggies at Los Alamos and other places in the decades after World War II. His contributions to both the development of the science (e.g. how to increase bomb yield while reducing the size of bombs) and the safeguarding of nuclear material are significant. McPhee's writing is vintage - crisp, lean and easy. As I tell my friends, and have probably scribed before, the guy could write about paint drying and make it interesting. No need here - an interesting topic unto itself. And, despite being written in the early 1970's, it still holds form today. Though I imagine the safeguarding of nuclear material is more secure now 40 years later.

A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson

It was an advertisement for the movie that moved me to read this, finally. Though I've known of the book for years and listened to Deb (wyf) wax poetically about its humor and though I've hiked many a mile on the Appalachian Trail myself it's taken some time to get around to reading it. I liked it. Not as much for the humor, there's plenty a funny moment, but for the description of the varying degrees of misery one encounters while humping a 40 pound pack up and down rocky trails. Rocky trails are what the Appalachian Trail does best - it's a mountain range, after all - and an old one at that (400 million years, give or take). I've hiked out west on some lovely smooth packed dirt trails - they have nothing on the AT. I'm keenly aware of how miserable one can get on the trail. On my first foray into the woods (22 years old, pemigewassat wilderness and Mt. Garfield in NH) I was still a pack a day smoker and thought it prudent to carry canned food in my pack. You may imagine how successful I was. Bryson is excellent at pacing a narrative and weaving in the past; the sections on the history of the trail are particularly enjoyable and I have to wonder if he has a personal gripe against the National Park Service - about which he has few good things to say. There's a funny sequence where he thinks a bear invades his camp one night. This resonated with me because I, too, have been awoken in the middle of the night in the woods by a horrific noise that scared the living !&%$ out of me and my fellow hiker (MG will know of which I speak) - it just turned out to be two "through hikers" who heard someone down the trail snoring and, thinking it was a bear, made quite the racket to scare it off. Walking in the woods is one my very favorite pastimes - I'm glad I read this book.