I had hoped to get to Stephen Inwood's The Forgotten Genius before doing this chatter segment, but unfortunately that was not in the cards. I am very curious to read it, as my knowledge of Hooke as a man comes primarily from biographies of other people, like Newton or Halley, in which Hooke is the jealous jerkwad who so beat Newton into the ground when he presented his early ideas on optics that Newton vowed never to go public with his ideas again, causing him to sit on gravitation and calculus for years and years and years. And while I don't believe Inwood argues that this is a gross perversion of Hooke's behavior, I understand that he modifies it by saying Hooke was not ALWAYS that way, that there are some pretty heavy duty biographical facts that slowly twisted him into that position. If you've actually read it, chime in on our Facebook page - otherwise keep checking in and we'll talk about it soonish!

In books that I have read, I just added Juliane Haubold-Stolle's Oma ist die Beste to the Good Reads page. It's in German, which takes it out of the running for some of y'all, but for those who know the language, it's a fun cultural history of grandmothers. I was pleasantly shocked to find that the picture of The Grandmother that I had thought was a constant of Western Civilization has been actually backwards written into the history - that if you look at the original documents, rather than the, say, Victorian representations of those time periods, the position of this figure was something else entirely, and watching that representation change is very interesting and delightful.

And as to this Katte fellow - that is a story for another day!

- Count Dolby von Luckner