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--> Nonfiction Behold, the Medici moons GALILEO GALILEI: The Tuscan Artist By Pietro Greco, translated by Giuliana Giobbi 383 pp. Springer Reviewed by Marty Carlock If you want to know every minuscule detail about Galileo, down to his friends, correspondents, doubters, believers, acolytes and enemies – in the sixteenth century everybody who was anybody had blatant enemies – Pietro Greco is your man. If you want an easy read, look elsewhere. The book suffers from a spectacularly bad translation from Italian. It required some nimble re-translation as I read – becoming accustomed, for instance, to use of the word “realize” to mean “fabricate” or “develop,” as in, to realize a scientific instrument. Or to malapropisms like “the emergency of a new science.” Greco is an Italian science writer, educated as a chemist, editor of Scienza & Societ á and active in science education in Italy. The translator’s English is better than my Italian, but it appears she worked with a dictionary...

Fiction Dangerous psycho, buried secrets SEE ALSO PROOF A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery By Larry D. Sweazy 251 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Veteran mystery and Western writer Larry D. Sweazy is back with his third Marjorie Trumaine mystery. (The first two, See Also Murder and See Also Deception , are also reviewed on this site.) Set in an unusual time and place for a mystery – the North Dakota plains in the 1960s – the series features an unforgettable sleuth. With her formidable intellect and voracious passion for reading, Marjorie Trumaine was her father’s pride and joy. He had hoped she’d become an English professor like his brother-in-law, not a farmer like him. Instead, she dropped out of college to marry her high-school sweetheart, farmer Hank Trumaine. Marjorie’s dream of building a big, happy family never came true. Unable to conceive, her doctor pronounced her barren. Then a freak hunting accident left Hank blind and paralyzed from the neck down...

Nonfiction Challenges for Mother Earth UNBOUND: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought the World to the Brink By Richard Currier 376 pp. Arcade Publishing   Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. While used occasionally before the last two hundred years the term technology has been widely applied to human effort since then. Currier uses it to describe events that in feels were critical to human progress. The author describes the primate baseline and how unusual monogamy is, occurring in only three percent of mammals, including humans. He writes that monogamy, while not perfect, promotes “social stability.” Drawing on very early man out of Africa such as “Lucy,” Currier describes how standing fully upright, forging fire hardening sticks, and especially a bigger brain benefitted the early hominids in their ascent . In the cleverly titled chapter “Hats, Huts, Togas and Tents,” s humans protect themselves and move into more hostile environments around the ...

Nonfiction Troubled marriage, nanswered questions LOVE AND DEATH IN THE SUNSHINE STATE The Story of a Crime By Cutter Wood 242 pp. Algonquin Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Author Cutter Wood, previously known as a magazine essayist, makes his debut with his first nonfiction book, but don’t let the subtitle fool you – it isn’t really a true crime book, though true crime plays a big part in it. It isn’t even a nonfiction book entirely; that will become evident later. A few months after his college graduation, before he became a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa, (in the creative nonfiction program) Cutter Wood received a newspaper clipping in the mail from his mother. It was about the motel on Anna Maria Island, Florida, where he’d just stayed. The accompanying photograph showed the motel engulfed in flames, the result of a suspicious fire. What made it suspicious was the fact that a car belonging to one of the motel’s owners, a woman named Sabine Musil-Beuhler, had ...