Michael Connelly The Reversal Book Review

The Reversal is the third installment of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller (The Lincoln Lawyer) series and is the first time we see Mickey Haller team up with Harry Bosch from New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly’s flagship Bosch series.

Defense attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to prosecute the high-profile retrial of a brutal child murder. After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller must team up not only Bosch but his ex-wife a full time district attorney to convict Jessup a second time.

Together, Bosch and Haller set off on the case LAPD Detective Bosch must find a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years. In the meantime Haller must deal with Jessup being out on bail and trying to put together a case on evidence 24 years old.

During the road to building a case Haller must deal with a sly and crafty defense attorney that loves the media and using the media to his advantage. All this while Harry Bosch must stay on Jessup’s tail using surveillance and his detective skills.

This is my favorite book out of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller series having both Haller and Bosch working together on a case pulls you into the book. The other thing that really draws you in is having Haller a veteran defense attorney being the prosecutor gives you insight to how he thinks and his pure skill set for the law.

I would give this book 5 stars it’s a great book I would rate this as best book Michael Connelly has written.

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The Reversal (A Lincoln Lawyer Novel)

Interview Jessie From Grawlix Podcast

I am working on getting a podcast going talking about books and comic but until then here are some old shows from my old website that I did talking about comics with some friends of mine.

Today in this podcast we are joined by Jessie from Grawlix Podcast. We talk X-Factor comics and Spawn. We discuss X-Men women characters and ever changing X-Men team. We talk about X-Men Gambit joining X-Factor and being in Marvel Comic movies. We talk about Spawn HBO Series not being available on HBOGO and the Spawn Movie. We talk about image comics and the Angela series. Jessie talks about the action figure boom in the 90’s.  We talk about Marvel Comic spin offs Wolverine and Gambit series. We get into a deep discussion Marvel Comic Gambit character and being a professional thief. We speak about Marvel Comic Gambit clothing and attire and merchandise sales. X-Men Gambit famous lines on cartoon series. Randi joins us again as a caller.

Chris Hardwick The Nerdist Way Book Review

I generally don’t read self-help books, but I picked this up because I am a fan of Chris Hardwick but I like the Talking Dead Show and I have listened to his podcast a few times. Chris Hardwick, who some may recognize as being one of the hosts of MTV’s Singled Out way back in the 90s and most recently Talking Dead Every week on AMC.

Chris Hardwick spent much of his 20s partying, drinking, and generally ruining his life. He ended up regaining his life after he quit drinking in 2003 and started trying to improve his life. Now he has multiple projects on the go, including a successful podcast, a new podcast network, and several TV gigs.

The secrets to Hardwick’s success aren’t anything new. Basically, he was able to harness his innate nature his nerdiness, so to speak and use it to his advantage. And that’s what this book is about. He talks about nerds having the highest level of focus and how to channel it to their advantage.

The book provides useful information on how to analyze your current habits and how to improve on them so you can live to your full potential. Chris Hardwick uses visualization tricks to help overcome the times when your brain can’t stop thinking about something and reclaiming a few hours of your life every week. Also the personal character sheet is fun art projects.

Chris Hardwick book takes you through his ups and downs and came out the other side wanting to share how he grew as a person. He gives you tips and tricks based on his life how to improve yours. For a self-help book I would give it 5 stars.

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The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life)

iWoz by Steve Wozniak Book Review

iWoz is a life story written by Steve Wozniak by well himself. We all have heard the stories of Apple but I think this book really gives you an insight into Steve Wozniak the person. I never knew so much about Steve Wozniak the person until I read this book. I knew his Apple stories but never his personal life.

Steve Wozniak really takes a deep look into his education talking about math his science projects and his college years and of course his college pranks. Steve Wozniak talks about his deep love of electronics and love of engineering. Steve talks about both his parents and how influential they were in his upbringing and education.

I loved his stories about creating a dial a joke number and using his blue box to call long distance numbers to listen to jokes. I really enjoyed his section about answering machines and picking easy phone numbers for jokes.

Steve Wozniak talks about his time at Hewlett Packard and creating calculators there and his love of working at HP and how great it was and all the fun things he did there and loved. He talks about how he left HP and moved on to Apple.

Steve Wozniak dives into his relationships with his wives and the love of his children. He talks about child hood development and his love of teaching and education.

Steve Wozniak writes about his journey of life after Apple and his work on the first universal remote.

I loved this book I would definably make this required reading for anyone with love of apple products. If you have an iPhone, iMac or iPad this will give you respect for the man who founded the first Apple products the Apple 1 and Apple 2. I give this book 5 Stars.

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iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

Art Bell The Art of Talk Book Review

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. I have only discovered Art Bell within the last year or so, unfortunately (wish I had started listening earlier). But I felt compelled to learn more about this fascinating guy. Art Bell is a hall of fame radio broadcaster and former nightly host of Coast to Coast AM. Art Bell would then retire and move to weekends then start another show on SiriusXM called Dark Matter after being off the air for years. Art Bell is now retired again and is looking into podcasting a new show.

The book is a bit dated since being published in 1998 but the book gives you insight into Art Bell’s entire life history. I remember listening the night on the radio where he was taking calls from fans for book name suggestions. When reading the book you have to remember it was published in the pinnacle of his broadcasting career.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to get to know the man behind the voice that I was so accustomed to hearing night after night. Besides his childhood, education, domestic life, and career, Art discusses how he used to get callers and guests to talk on the air, and even relates his feelings toward what he heard and was broadcasting. He discusses his transition from Ham Radio into talk radio and how he spent time in the military which started his career and interest in the radio business.

The book is written in a conversational style that made me imagine I was chatting with Art in his studio during commercial breaks. If you are familiar with Art Bell’s voice, his on-air personality & the general aura presented on his radio show, this book flows in a familiar way.

I found almost every chapter captivating which if you’re a fan of Art Bell you know no one captivates an audience better and keeps them engaged. The chapter on his world travels and vacations I could have done without but again being a fan you understand that his world travels made him the man he is today. Overall I think this was a great book with a very different writing style I would give this book 5 star rating.

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The Art of Talk

Michael Connelly The Brass Verdict Book Review

This terrific follow-up to The Lincoln Lawyer, featuring troubled defense lawyer Mickey Haller, also includes famed police detective Harry Bosch, who has been a hero in thirteen previous Connelly mysteries. Though Haller and Bosch work on opposite sides (one on defense and one on prosecution) and even live on opposite sides of the bay, they are thrown together against their wills and must cooperate if they are going to see justice served.

Haller has just returned to law practice after a hiatus in which he has dealt with his demons and his addictions, the result of a long, painful hospitalization and several complex surgeries after he was “gut shot.” Haller has inherited the entire caseload of former prosecutor Jerry Vincent, who became a defense attorney after Haller beat him soundly in a court case. Vincent has been murdered in the garage beside his office, his laptop and case notes missing, with the biggest case of his career due for trial in less than a week.

Walter Elliot, head of the highly successful Archway Pictures, is being tried for the murder of his wife and her lover, and he refuses to agree to a continuance, even though Haller, new to the case, recommends it. This case, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, soon begins to overlap with another of Vincent’s cases–one taken pro bono, and not in any of Vincent’s  files or on his calendar–a complete “mystery case” to Haller.

As he works, Haller relies on stalwart friends and associates, all of whom show their own personalities here as they support Haller and try to keep him from backsliding under stress. His first former wife, Maggie McPherson, a prosecutor, needs to be reassured that he is stable enough to be a father again to his daughter. His second former wife, Lorna Taylor, still works with him, though she is now living with Dennis Wojchiechowski (Cisco), Haller’s investigator.

Harry Bosch, who is investigating the Jerry Vincent murder for the police, frequently overlaps with Haller regarding issues in Vincent’s cases, and they occasionally meet. Though they are alike in many ways, their hostility is often palpable.

As Haller looks for the “magic bullet,” the “get-out-of-jail-free” card that would clear Walter Elliot of a double murder, he must explore issues of bribery, jury tampering, fraud, police misconduct, organized crime, legal malpractice, federal crime, and even international crime–not to mention murder, including potentially his own.

The novel, written in exceptionally clear prose, keeps all the complications from becoming overwhelming as the author recreates the legal one-upsmanship of a case going to trial. Connelly draws the reader in and increases the tension by making him/her an “expert” on the legal importance of events to the Elliot case. Exciting, beautifully crafted, filled with non-stop action, and always centered on achieving justice, this novel is completely satisfying–one that has it all.

I am a big fan of Michael Connelly’s work I give this book 5 star great job on character development, sorry line direction and information is very informative. He makes you feel like a real life lawyer is telling the story.

The Cuckoos Egg Book Review

This is a real-life spy thriller centered on computer hacking and espionage on high-end military and research establishments in the US. We read about painstaking hours spent by the author, stalking an intruder through computer terminals and communication hardware and experiencing indifference from the FBI, the NSA, the CIA and the Air force and the Army even though it is these institutions’ computers which were detected by the author as having been compromised by the hacker. Finally, you read about repeated attempts by the author, tracking the hacker and failing to nail him due to the intruder logging off a little too soon before the international phone-tap could succeed. The events occur in the late 1980s and so I found all the technical details of the ‘security holes’ which were exploited by the hacker in Unix systems and VAX computers quite familiar and fascinating, having heard about issues like thing in college. What is really revelatory about these events was that it took the hacker mainly patience and not software wizardry to break into all these high security systems because most of these systems simply used obvious passwords or emailed passwords in clear text between systems and the systems administrators hardly monitoring any of the audit trails to see if unauthorized users have logged on to their systems. In many ways, it shows that the computer world in 1987 was a much more innocent one than it is today, with most systems being open and trusting so as to enable co-operation and inter-operability between institutions and individual scientists.

Dr.Clifford Stoll was an astrophysicist with the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL) and has the profile of the typical left-leaning Berkeley academic. As Systems manager, he stumbles on a small 75 cent accounting discrepancy in his systems and while tracking it down, finds himself zeroing in on a hacker who was prowling his systems as well as the nation’s military and research networks. The hacker takes him across the US, then under the Atlantic Ocean in the company of defense contractors and Universities and finally to the city of Hannover in Germany. The ‘chase’ ends in the discovery of a spy-ring in West Germany (this was before communism’s collapse in 1990) selling industrial and military secrets to the Soviet Intelligence in return for cocaine and much money. Dr.Stoll’s efforts end successfully in March 1989, after about an year of stalking the hacker.

This book is the true story of Markus Hess, a German citizen, is best known for his endeavors as a hacker in the late 1980s. Hess was recruited by the KGB to be an international spy with the objective of securing U.S. military information for the Soviets.

This book is a great true crime novel with a good very in-depth look into both the author’s life and the technology of the 1980’s. I give this book 5 stars it’s a great book with real life drama and facts. The book can be found on amazon in regular and ebook format.

The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage