Winner of the Autism Society of America’s Dr. Temple Grandin Award for the Outstanding Literary Work in Autism

A groundbreaking book on autism, by one of the world’s leading experts, who portrays autism as a unique way of being human—this is “required reading...Breathtakingly simple and profoundly positive” (Chicago Tribune).

Autism therapy typically focuses on ridding individuals of “autistic” symptoms such as difficulties interacting socially, communication problems, sensory challenges, and repetitive behavior patterns. Now, this updated and expanded edition of Dr. Barry M. Prizant’s Uniquely Human tackles new language such as shifting from “person-first language” to “identity-first language,” diversity of identity in the autism sphere, and the future of autistic advocacy by amplifying the voices of autistic and neurodivergent individuals.

So, let’s amend. It’s not that historical fiction is no longer published, it’s that the relatively few openings are designated for rather particular types of history. First, history is rewritten with fantastical elements or really a fantasy set in a historical setting. History is also rewritten altogether with “gender swaps” of key historical figures (e.g., King Arthur as a girl) or modern issues and ways of thinking implanted into characters from the past.

It’s enough to convince a young reader that praiseworthy women were always champions of feminist ideals, that every century grappled with the same racism spoken of today, and that every noble family had a progressive daughter who wanted everyone to be equal. All of which bends more toward fantasy than history. (Netflix’s adaptation of the highly engaging, highly beloved classic Anne of Green Gables, “Anne with an E,” was rendered unwatchable with the imposition of modern sensibilities not found in the book such as racism, sexuality, and feminism.)

Second, many agents willing to take on historical projects specify only “non-Western” historical fiction, fables, settings, etc. Ostensibly, the purpose is to write something new and increase the range of stories available to readers. Which would be a good thing if the “inclusivity box” had been widened, instead of merely shifted away from the Western world.

Third, only particular time periods with particular types of protagonists make the cut. If you’re an adult reader, you may have noticed the oversaturation of World War II stories on historical fiction shelves. Notably, these aren’t usually Holocaust stories (though those usually get published, too), but “untold” stories about the women of the war. Victorian England. The latter half of the 1900s. The occasional Greek gods and mythology, a dash from ancient India or Arabia, and that basically covers the entire range of historical fiction on offer. Moreover, any historical reference during war, tyranny, or other trying times is usually a simple narrative of “evil man was bad” instead of an introduction into some of the social and political complexities that encourage any particular event or era to come about. //

Like anyone, teens will pursue information about things they care about, and what better way to get them to understand what we went through to get to this point, what life was like before, and what was endured to build society, than connecting to a character living and dealing in the nuances of those times?

Let young readers imagine themselves in the shoes of their historical counterparts. Let them draw courage from those who fought and endured and dedicated themselves to something bigger. Let them live through characters who have to make tough choices because history isn’t black and white, but a whole gradient of gray. And, once they’re interested, let them go looking for more. See if they don’t get better at understanding history then.

I never heard of it when it was a "hit Broadway show." I never heard of Jonny Donahoe, whose one-man show it is. And when I happened to skim past it on HBO, I thought at first that it was stand-up comedy.

Every Brilliant Thing is listed as a documentary, //

onny Donahoe, a plump, energetic, charming Brit, grew up with a bipolar mother, who vacillated between bursts of ecstatic energy and deep, soul-destroying depression. Even in his youth, Donahoe was aware that his mother lived on the brink of suicide, and one of his efforts to inspire her not to kill herself was a massive list.

It didn't start out massive. His modest goal was to come up with a couple of hundred things that made life worth living -- a list of "every brilliant thing." Soon it became a list of a thousand brilliant things, and then hundreds of thousands.

By any measure, it became his life's work. Because he, too, suffered from depression, and this list was as much talking to himself as it was talking to his mother.

During the show Every Brilliant Thing, we hear maybe fifty entries from the list. They range from perfectly ordinary things which become brilliant when you hear them mentioned in this context. Others truly are extraordinary, though it's easy for us to forget about them.

The list itself would be enough to make this potentially depressing show an exercise in optimism. But the list is merely the maguffin, and you do not have to be or know a person who wrestles with suicidal impulses in order to be glad you watched Every Brilliant Thing.

Because, ultimately, this show is not just about suicide. On another level, it's a really funny and inspiring example of live theatre at its best. Because in telling his story, Donahoe involves the audience. To many people in this tiny arena house, he has given entries in the list -- with numbers either high or low. They wait for their number to be called out, and then in a clear voice they read that particular "brilliant thing."

But this is only the beginning, because Donahoe is telling stories, and when he needs to stage a scene, he does -- with audience members as actors. Now, it's possible that these are ringers, but I don't think so. I've seen few actors who could fake the natural responses of these people. After the show, we hear snatches of conversation between these audience members, making it clear that no, they had not been coached, except whatever coaching Donahoe himself gives on stage right in front of us.

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Davey Jones' Locker
12 hours ago
I don't know if you've read Rick Atkinson's trilogy on the African and European theaters of WWII, but I learned a lot from reading these books. //

Davey Jones' Locker Reddog
11 hours ago
Another great trilogy read is Ian Toll's War in the Pacific. The first book is The Pacific Crucible. Toll also authored one the best American history books I've read: Six Frigates. The beginning of the U.S. Navy.

When did spaceflight begin? There is no single answer.

For newcomers to space, the beginning of time can be traced to as recently as December 2015. That's when SpaceX landed its Falcon 9 rocket successfully for the first time, opening the modern era of rapid, reusable spaceflight. Increasingly, anything that came before feels anachronistic.

But for those with a bit more perspective, the dawn of spaceflight can be pushed back further back into time, to the 1957 launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite that shocked the world. This small orbiting spacecraft kicked off the frenetic space race that culminated with NASA's Apollo 11 Moon landing just a dozen years later.

Yet in a new book, From the Earth to Mars, space entrepreneur Jeffrey Manber takes us back much further into the murk of history to divine the origins of spaceflight. His story goes back a century and a half, telling the tales of some figures who are fairly well known, such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, and others a bit less so, including Thea von Harbou and Robert Esnault-Pelterie. //

Manber's book is subtitled "Before the Governments were Involved." The second book in the series, he says, will tackle Russian rocket builders. I look forward to it.

How many other beloved books have been bowdlerized and then reissued without the public’s knowledge? //

“It seems depressing that we are so squeamish that we can’t credit youngsters with seeing the context for texts,” Geoff Barton, head of King Edward’s School in Bury St Edmunds, added.

Ebooks come in approximately 4,312 formats, of which approximately 4,300 are considered obsolete by most people who deal with ebooks today.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

• Author: Isaac AsimovAuthor Record # 5
• Legal Name: Asimov, Isaac
• Birthplace: Petrovichi, Smolensk Governorate, Russia
• Birthdate: 2 January 1920
• Deathdate: 6 April 1992
• Language: English
• Note: Became a US citizen in 1928. Undergraduate degree in chemistry from Columbia University, 1939; MA in 1941; PhD in chemistry from Columbia University, 1948. Brother of Stanley Asimov. Married Janet Asimov in 1973.

Today Universal releases “Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan. The IMAX biopic stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb.

Nolan’s film is based on the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. This review summarizes the book. Nolan’s film does not focus on the early career of this brilliant and eccentric academic. For that, we can rewatch “The Absent-Minded Professor” (1961). Cinema can remind us of the 1940s’ heroic battles as well as more cerebral endeavors to develop instruments for detection, navigation, and propulsion.

Oppenheimer’s life holds major questions about the use of power that continue to affect the world today. His team’s scientific advances warrant a much closer look. //

The design challenge for Oppenheimer’s team was enormous. They had to investigate the fission process into a near-instantaneous chain reaction based on meager experimental results. Oppenheimer’s keen ability to comprehend and extol these specialists is a testament to his diligence during those long hours. //

Our violent introduction to the atomic age taints humanity’s acceptance of it. The amazing phenomenon of atomic nuclei releasing energy by exchanging nucleons holds enormous promise.

Had fission been discovered a decade earlier or later, it could have benignly provided electrical power. But in an existential military conflict, leaders deemed such patience a luxury America couldn’t afford. So humans turned this fantastic tool into a cudgel, and continue to live under that shadow today.

This guide is meant to take you step-by-step through the creation of a complete Standard Ebook. While it might seem a little long, most of the text is a description of how to use various automated scripts. It can take just an hour or two for an experienced producer to produce a draft ebook for proofreading (depending on the complexity of the ebook, of course).

Our toolset is GNU/Linux-based, and producing an ebook from scratch currently requires working knowledge of the epub file format and of Unix-like systems like Mac or Linux.

Our toolset doesn’t yet work natively on Windows, but there are many ways to run Linux from within Windows, including one that is directly supported by Microsoft themselves.

Communist in FDR's Administration
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 3, 2019
The Venona Secrets
I had read the book by Herbert Hoover, “Freedom Betrayed” the book, “Witness.” by Whittaker Chambers, the book by Diana West, “American Betrayal,” the book by M. Stanton Evans, “Blacklisted By History,” the book by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Raomerstein, “Stalin’s Secret Agents,” and the book by John Koster, “Operation Snow” so I had a good idea how the Communist had infiltrated the Roosevelt administration. More than one of these books that I had read referred to the Venona cables.

Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel stated in the preface of this book that of particular interest to both of them was the Soviet attitude toward Jews. They wrote that they were not surprised that the NKVD, the Soviet foreign intelligence service, showed disdain for and made cynical use of the Jews willing to work for them. What surprised them was the Venona code name for Jews- “Rats.” They devote chapter 10 to this subject of Jews serving the Communist.

The authors made it clear that Moscow’s agents in the United States helped prevent an earlier Nazi surrender to the Anglo-Americans; the prospect of which haunted the USSR throughout the war. How Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White played an important role in the Soviet endeavor. White was what intelligence professionals call an “agent of influence.”
He not only spied for the Soviet Union throughout the war but also sought to shape critical U.S. economic policies in obedience to the orders of his Moscow masters. As a spy, he was a rival in perfidy to Alger Hiss and to the trio of British traitors, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean. The authors of this book go on to explain how “Operation Snow,” was executed by White and Soviet agents.

One of White’s greatest contributions to the Soviet effort was his role in the Morgenthau Plan for postwar Germany. The Morgenthau Plan was to convert Germany into a pasture. This book explains how it was conceived and what effect it had on Germany, Jews and our military forces.

White’s political star within the Roosevelt administration was never higher than in 1944. White was the chief American delegate at the historic conference in Britton Woods, New Hampshire, that plotted the postwar financial rules by which the Allies intended to restore their battered economies. Read this book to see how that turned out!

On March 31, 1945 Secretary of State Edward Stettinius wrote to White, “
On behalf of President Roosevelt and the members of the American delegation, it is my privilege to extend to you an invitation to become an official advisor to the delegation of the United states to the United Nations Conference on International Organization….” Less than a week later, a Moscow Venona message ordered Alhmerov to make arrangements with Silvermaster (Robert) about maintaining contact with White, then called (Richard), and another member of the Silvermaster ring, William Ludwig Ullman (Pilot) in San Francisco (Babylon).
During White’s attendance at the San Francisco conference, he was handled by NKVD officer Vladimir Pravdin (Sergej), who served in New York but attended the conference as a Soviet news agency TASS, reporter. White gave the Soviets information of the American delegation’s internal discussions. White also reported that “Truman and Stettinius want to achieve the success of the conference at any price.”

Alger Hiss, as agent of the GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence), was the acting secretary general at the founding conference of the UN. This provided the Soviets with the advanced notice on how the Americans would handle questions during the deliberations.

President Harry Truman had appointed the Treasury official as executive director of the International Monetary Fund. J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, President Truman’s military aid, asking him to give the enclosed background on White to the president. Hoover described White as a valuable adjunct to an underground Soviet espionage organization operating in Washington D.C., also the Canadian government sources had expressed their concern to the FBI about the appointment of White. The Canadians knew of White through the Soviet military intelligence defector Igor Gouzenko. Harry Truman did nothing with these reports and White was appointed.

Herbert and Eric go into great details of how the Soviet agents made an Apparat (was a full-time, professional functionary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union or the Soviet government apparat (аппарат, apparatus), someone who held any position of ...)

Chapter 4 is a chapter that explains Whittaker Chamber’s Spy Ring, I think Chambers does a much better job if this in his book “Witness.”

Chapter 5 details the Elizabeth Bentley Spy Ring, also the Silvermaster Ring, The Perlo Ring, and talks some about how Eleanor Roosevelt was targeted by the Soviets agents. The authors seem, to me, to be letting the Roosevelts off the hook, to their way of thinking, it is only because the Roosevelts are so naïve, that these spies were all over the White House. Why would Eleanor give the order to shut down the act of deciphering the Venona cables??? I’m glad her orders were not carried out.

Chapter 6 and 7 lays out the details of the Atomic Espionage. Here I found what I was looking for when I ordered this book. I had read much about Harry Hopkins in Diana West’s book American Betrayal and wanted more sources concerning him as a spy. Since he, to me, was so important because of how close he was to the Roosevelts. Harry had lived in the White House, slept in the Lincoln bedroom for three years and six months. Harry had dined with the Roosevelt every night. In this chapter on page 212 I read, In the 1960s, Oleg Gordievssky, a KGB officer, attended a lecture by the veteran Chekist Iskhak Akhmerov, who, had been the” illegal” Rezident in the United States during the war. Akhmerov mentioned his contact with Alger Hiss, but “the man he described as the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in the United States” was Harry Hopkins. Direct evidence in Venona confirms Akhmerov’s statement of his connection with Hopkins. This explains why Hopkins was adamant about shipping uranium to the Soviet Union despite the objections of the military authorities. Another example was Hopkins promotion of his friends including Colonel Philip R. Faymonville, who had been military attaché in Moscow from 1933 to 1938. Faymonville’s colleagues considered him to be extremely pro-soviet, calling him the “Red-Colonel.” When Hopkins in 1941 suggested sending him back to Moscow to expedite Lend-Lease, army intelligence objected. Hopkins said only, “You might as well get his papers ready, because he’s going.” Hopkins arranged for Faymonville to be promoted to brigadier general and later to general. Long story short, Faymonville was set-up, he met a young man that became his lover but was also a Soviet NKVD agent.

Later we learn about “Kvant” a mercenary spy, and Arthur Adams a Veteran Spy, Klaus Fuchs, a spy from Germany, The Rosenberg Case, other members of the Rosenberg Ring, Sarant and Barr Flee.

Chapter 8 Atomic Espionage in California at the University of Berkeley, how the Soviets used Trade Unions, The J. Robert Oppenheimer Case,

Chapter 9 How the Soviets targeted the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), VENONA reveals how easy the NKVD penetrated OSS, The French Connection.

Chapter 10- see above
Chapter 11 The Jack Soble/Robert Soblen Ring, Zarubin’s Stern Gang

Chapter 12- Polecats (Trotskyites) and Rats, (Jews), Stalin: Jews and Negroes Are Not Americans, Targeting Jewish Organizations, Duping Albert Einstein, The Murder of Erlich and Alter, Target: Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The International Workers Order and Espionage,

Chapter 13 Target: Journalists, The recruitment of I.F. Stone, Target: Lippmann, Mission in Moscow,

Chapter 14
The new documentation available since 1991 has been broadly, in two categories-(1) the archives of the Communist International, which were kept in Moscow, and the files of other Communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe; and (2) the Venona papers, which were kept in Forte Meade, Maryland. But finally made public, the material from east and west combined shows that the U.S. Communist Party was extensively and fruitfully in Moscow’s espionage infrastructure in America. The Party’s personalities, including General Secretary Earl Browder, were active participants in recruiting and vetting Party members on behalf of Soviet intelligence. Indeed, most of the wartime Soviet agents in the United States were members of the communist Party. Through the Party, the USSR was able to draw prospective agents from a pool of ideologues loyal to Moscow, a circumstance unique in history. This reality, which was clear to U.S. government investigators and many others for decades but which was- and is- disputed by liberal historians, is now a known fact.

Fact: There existed in important agencies of the U.S. government networks of American spies under the control of Soviet military intelligence and NKVD officers. These included individuals whose disloyalty has been acknowledged for years by almost all serious students of the subject, Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, and the Rosenbergs through the years have had a shrinking pool of defenders. Others, until the Venona documents were aired, were considered heroes of American liberalism.

Fact: Venona has shown conclusively that the highest-level American government officials working for Soviet intelligence was Harry Hopkins, the close friend and advisor of President Roosevelt. His clandestine contact with “illegal” Soviet intelligence officer Iskhak Akhmerov,
To whom he provided secret government information, alone makes the case against Hopkins. Only a Soviet agent would be permitted to know that an “illegal” intelligence officer such as Akhmerov was connected with the Soviet Union.

Fact: Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer performed work on behalf of the Soviet Union. Although it has long been known that several of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project believed the world would be safer if the secrets of the atomic energy were shared with the Soviet Union, it had been considered bad manners even to suggest that the sensitive Oppenheimer could possibly be so crude as to be a conscious collaborator with the Soviet secret police. But he was.

Fact: The Left (Liberals) liked to use one of the right wing’s favorite complaints as evidence of its inanity-its belief that American journalists, including some of the best known, had been deliberately enlisted in the Soviet cause. The Venona documents leave no room for doubts that this was exactly the case, in particular regarding the loyalty of I.F. Stone to the Soviet Union and, in his case, to his book account.

Fact: The Communist movement displayed systematic and consistent anti-Semitism.

https://www.amazon.com/Venona-Secrets-Exposing-Espionage-Americas/dp/0895262754/

Raymond Ibrahim’s book, ‘Defenders of the West,’ makes the case that the heroic actions of a few great crusaders saved the West from Muslim conquest. //

Fewer moments in history are as misunderstood and revised as the Crusades. This series of violent clashes between Christian and Muslim cultures spanning three continents and nearly a millennium has been characterized as a futile war of aggression. In the telling of most modern historians, belligerent, greedy, and racist Christians in Western Europe were periodically guided by a bloodthirsty theocrat in Rome to channel their savage energies toward embattling a rival faith in the delusional belief that this would guarantee their admittance into Heaven, if not an earthly kingdom to rule over. What resulted was hardly more than pointless slaughter on both sides.

Nearly all of this is false. The Crusades were wars of defense, with Christians attempting to drive out foreign Muslim invaders in lands that were formerly Christian. Far from being unenlightened savages, the Crusaders were a highly organized force that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in warfare, government, and religious practice. The great personal sacrifice of the Crusaders, along with moral arguments against the use of violence, disprove the idea that they did this for personal gain.

By contrast, the Muslim invaders greatly profited from their conquests.

Prescription for the Planet -- Tom Blees

Robert Hargraves
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rx: nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2008

This is a book about three world-wide problems and three technologies to solve them. It's a book about technologies written by an Alaskan fisherman for understanding by the general public.

Nuclear power can solve global warming primarily by eliminating CO2 emissions from coal power plants, and secondarily by enabling new vehicle fuels. Nuclear power reactors in the US have not changed design in decades, and the public's perception seems to be acceptance of the mysterious domed plants, but with concern for the spent nuclear fuel waste.

There are newer, better nuclear technologies than these solid fueled, water-cooled reactors, which are generally unknown to the public. Tom Blees describes one: The Integral Fast Reactor consumes spent fuel reactor waste, generates power from the 95% of potential energy left in the waste, and does not involve any transport of weapons-proliferation-sensitive plutonium outside the plant. The IFR project, developed and tested for a decade at Argonne National Laboratories, was two years from fruition when it was killed in 1984 by President Bill Clinton, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, and Senator John Kerry.

The IFR would have solved the coal-burning energy crisis, consumed existing nuclear power plant waste, and not isolated inventories of plutonium (as does the French power program.) I nearly cried when I first heard of the death of the IFR, and Blees tells the story well. Since Blees wrote this book he has learned about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, which has these same advantages at lower cost.

Boron fuels were completely new to me. Cars, trucks, and airplanes require portable energy supplies, such as gasoline, diesel oil, or natural gas (the Pickens Plan). Electric batteries can provide this stored energy for cars. Liquid or compressed hydrogen is another (impractical) energy carrier. Blees points out that boron metal can be a portable fuel. Boron metal is combined with oxygen in a special engine to generate power. The resulting boron-oxide is later brought to a refueling station to be exchanged for a new supply of boron metal fuel. The refueling station uses electricity to convert the boron oxide back to boron metal fuel.

Boron fuel eliminates carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, and it eliminates dependence on foreign oil. (I think there is much more boron fuel R&D work to be done.)

Plasma arc gasification of waste is another technology new to me. Four states of matter are solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasma is so hot (4,000 - 17,000 C) that electrons are torn free, molecular bonds are broken, and elemental nucleii are freed. Toxic chemicals are destroyed. The cooled plasma becomes a glass-like slag. It takes a lot of electric power to operate a plasma arc torch, but in the case of municipal solid waste, the process can generate 28x more natural gas energy than electric energy consumed.

There are solutions for our environmental and energy problems! Blees' Prescription for the Planet is nuclear power + boron fuel + plasma waste gasification.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/1419655825/R2X21JGKLSMBBY

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419655825/

The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) is a fast reactor system developed at Argonne National Laboratory in the decade 1984 to 1994. The IFR project developed the technology for a complete system; the reactor, the entire fuel cycle and the waste management technologies were all included in the development program. The reactor concept had important features and characteristics that were completely new and fuel cycle and waste management technologies that were entirely new developments.

NaturalReader is text to speech app that reads text, PDF, webpages, and eBooks aloud to you with our quality, natural-sounding voices.

The app we’re using is called “NaturalReader.” It’s available for the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. The app is completely free. For the best experience, you’ll want to sign up for an account. You can easily do so with a Google account or Apple ID.

Lastly, you will need an eBook of some sort. The app we’re using supports a wide variety of file types, including EPUB, MOBI, and PDF.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.naturalsoft.personalweb

Anecdotal, autobiographical sketch of Max Gergel and his adventures as a young (then older) mad scientist building the business Columbia Organic Chemicals.

Further tales of chemistry and travel from raconteur Max Gergel. Well worth reading if you enjoyed Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide?.