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Netsurfer Recommendations

Black Earth: A Journey through Russia after the Fall
Andrew Meier
W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393051781

Russia in the wake of the collapse of communism is a land of paradox. On the one hand, there is the country's enormous potential as the shackles of a repressive ideology are receding into the past. On the other hand, there is the reality of millions of people displaced in the economic and social turmoil that followed. Andrew Meier was a correspondent for Time magazine, covering the country from 1994 to 2001. This book is an account of his travels through post-communist Russia, starting in 2000. The journey takes him through Moscow, Chechnya, Norilsk, Sakhalin, and St. Petersburg, and what emerges is a portrait of a country of grim political and economic realities that still reflect the devastation of a dead ideology. In its language and tone, this is a literary travel book, appropriate to Russia, a country that lends itself so well to the drama of the written word. This fine and insightful work offers a glimpse into the soul of post-communist Russia.

Wasteland of Flint
Thomas Harlan
Tor Books; ISBN: 076530192X

Call this book an alternate future history mystery SF space opera. In Thomas Harlan's satisfying effort, the Japanese-Aztec culture came to dominate our industrial age. This book takes place in that culture's future, when humanity is expanding into space under the autocratic hand of the Mexica Empire. Archaeologist Gretchen Anderssen is called to investigate a disaster on faraway Ephesus III, a mysterious desert planet that may contain lethal artifacts from an earlier, far more advanced culture. Her work is complicated by the presence of Hummingbird, an Imperial judge and nauallis (shaman) who has his own secret agenda unknown even to his Imperial Fleet escort, headed by the imperturbable Captain Hadeishi. Besides being an entertaining and technologically sophisticated mystery, the book is also a study in the psychological undercurrents that flow in a society dominated by royal patronage and pervaded with subtle and sometimes blatant prejudice. The book works on several levels, with well developed main characters, a satisfying level of scientific extrapolation, and a cultural setting that begs for more literary exploration.

Spidering Hacks
Kevin Hemenway, Tara Calishain
O'Reilly & Associates; ISBN: 0596005776

We keep recommending the O'Reilly Hacks series because these books are just so darned useful. This book is not about arachnids but about programmatically retrieving information from the Web. The focus here is on the Perl programming language, primarily because of the vast and useful collection of Perl tools that exist specifically for downloading and parsing Web content. Using the right modules, you can fetch the contents of an entire Web site in only a couple of lines worth of code. With a few more lines, you can parse that information and extract just the bit you need - say a stock quote, or a picture, or an array of Amazon links, or all the URLs on a page. In its collection of 100 tips and tricks, the book hits on just about every conceivable method of gathering and analyzing Web data. It's clearly a must for anybody who wants to automate the gathering of Web data at any level, from one-off Web spiders to complex, database-driven Web scraping applications.

A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks Treasury
Aaron McGruder, Michael Moore (Forward)
Three Rivers Press; ISBN: 1400048575

There's a small number of funny and scathing political satirists working in comic-strip form today, but Aaron McGruder is probably the only one (besides what's-his name, Jane Pauley's husband) who has wide and international circulation - a deserved fame - outside small alternative newspapers. His protagonist, Huey, the pathologically cynical kid who thinks he's a rabid radical socialist, trades barbs with the other denizens of The Boondocks, allowing McGruder to take pot shots at just about every political and social target of opportunity in contemporary America. In particular, McGruder's black characters deconstruct black culture (especially BET) with devastating wit and insight. Like all great satirists, McGruder has the benefit of perfect targets in the conservative US administration and in a popular culture relentlessly shaped by corporate interests. But never mind the social relevance - the 800+ strips spanning four years are wonderfully artistic and danged funny, and that's the best reason of all to buy this book.