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Jon PENNYCOOK

jonpsp@ramblingreaders.org

Joined 1 year, 5 months ago

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science #scifi #scienceFiction

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Review of 'Speed of Sound : Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

More of a 90s dotcom boom memoir than one about a pop artist. I wanted to know how Thomas Dolby ended up working with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Akiko Yano, but I don't remember them being mentioned at all. I also wanted to know more about the Camera Club. The book galloped past that period. There was plenty of detail about his adventures in tech in San Francisco and whilst working with Netscape and Nokia.

Arkady Ostrovsky: The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War (Hardcover, 2015, Atlantic Books) 4 stars

An interesting summary of the changes that led to Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 by a regular contributor to The Economist magazine. It feels like the events that led to the collapse of the USSR and Yeltsin's rise to power and subsequently falling out of favour fill a lot of the book. The pace positively gallops once Putin appears. A lot of the book deals with the importance of television for communicating to the masses, both in the USSR and in Putin's Russia.

Arkady Ostrovsky: The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War (Hardcover, 2015, Atlantic Books) 4 stars

Review of "The Invention of Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War" on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

An interesting summary of the changes that led to Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014 by a regular contributor to The Economist magazine. It feels like the events that led to the collapse of the USSR and Yeltsin's rise to power and subsequently falling out of favour fill a lot of the book. The pace positively gallops once Putin appears. A lot of the book deals with the importance of television for communicating to the masses, both in the USSR and in Putin's Russia.