Author: Peter

State of Wonder

This is the book that set my wife and myself on a 8 month Ann Patchett spree. We started reading it aloud in the evenings, and it kept us on the edge of the couch, listening intently, until it was finished.

Looking for freedom along the railway lines

Freedom, by Sebastian Junger

I bought this on a whim, thinking I wanted to catch up with Sebastian Junger. I have not read War, or Tribe. Maybe I should—it might give me some context on where he’s coming from.

Freedom does not disappoint, although I did find it frustrating. The writing is utterly fascinating. Short anecdotes from colonial history, railroad engineering, anthropology, etc, all seem to add up to a meditative discourse—between Junger and himself—on the nature of freedom.…

All the Light We Cannot See

Another European war novel, by Anthony Doerr

It has fascinating plot certainly. I need to be careful not to give any spoilers. Let’s just say it is set in World War II, and half the book is set in Germany and half in France. It’s a coming-of-age tale for a girl in France and a boy in Germany, both of whom have lives utterly transformed by the horror of war.…

WordPress vs the JAM stack?

I love the JAM stack. I love working with Jekyll (for static HTML sites), JavaScript, and APIs. But I also like WordPress a little more than this guy..

Scaffolding an Angular + Bootstrap App

Fountainjs is a good way to scaffold your app if you want it built with Gulp, Sass and Webpack. This post is about adding Bootstrap the the mix—and how to fix everything that Bootstrap breaks.

A first rate tale, second rate prose

I love the ambition of this book, and it seems that Follett achieved his goal: the grand tale of the political upheavals of the early 20th Century Europe, and then the unfathomable horror that was the Great War.