Kent archie

Being a bit generous on the rating, it had very few spelling errors. I blame myself for not reading the description enough to realize that this wasn't about how the backstage of Disneyland worked, but silly fan fiction about the Disney characters cavorting when the park is closed.
Fortunately, it was short.

Pleasant short book about a tinkerer in the woods who built himself a pretty nice planetarium.
I grew up about 30 miles south of this guy and reading the book makes me want to visit him.
There is a long history in America of people fooling around with things in their garages, building what they couldn't buy. This guy is a perfect example of what is being called the Maker movement.

There are a lot of details in this book. It's mostly about Clarks life after the Voyage of Discovery. I was struck by how slowly things moved compared to now. Clark would travel from St. Louis to Washington to meet with government officials and the round trip would last a month. The events covered here would have been recent history for the people who founded my town. The past seems a little closer than it did.

A quick read and a fun one. It will probably make more sense if you have played a little dungeons and dragons. Quite some time ago in the town I was born in, the YMCA ran some D&D games and some local religious objected, as do some people in the book. They were not content to practice their believes, they felt it was necessary to impose these believes on other people. But the book is mostly a fun adventure

Good description of the pioneer project. I would have liked more about the Venus mission. The excitement of the missions and their place in the history of space exploration was excellent. I also wish there had been more details about what the instruments were and how they worked. Recommended if you like engineering histories.

I grew up read the Rick Brant Science Adventure series. It was sort of a cross between the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift. That's not really fair as the science part of Rick Brant was generally well thought out and realistic whereas Tom Swift was pretty silly. In the groups that talk about Rick Brant, people often refer to the Ken Holt books. This is one of those and it is well written and engaging. All these early YA series are pretty dated, this one was published in 1949. While you might not have to remember 25 cent gas and film photography to enjoy the book, it will probably help. The mystery was engaging and was solved by gathering clues and making connections, not just because the bad guys were stupid. So I recommend the book and probably the series. Also, a lot of these series were aimed at teenage boys. There is only one woman in this book, she runs the boarding house. Her major contributions were to deliver messages and bake cookies.

I enjoyed the book, lots of interesting detail. The maps are very helpful and interesting all by themselves.
Over a 20 year period, the railroads built about 1 mile an hour. And that was just west of Chicago.
The Acheson, Topeka and Santa Fe is the center of the story and it eventually became the Burlington Northern Santa Fe and I rode their trains everyday commuting into Chicago.

I have taken the train to Flagstaff and New Orleans from Chicago and enjoyed both trips.
It was nice to read the history of all that.

I actually got this from Gutenberg.org. This was written in the late 1800's by (I think) Brunels son.
The writing style then was very verbose, so this is tedious to read. It would also help if I was an actual
civil engineer and not just an ex-physics major who took a class in Statics.
The descriptions of Brunels bridges and railways use a lot of technical terms and it would be good if I understood more about the British economy and government in the 1800's. There aren't many pictures in here either.
More recent bibliographies would be an easier read.

Brunel accomplished amazing things back then. He and his father built the first tunnel under the Thames. He built railways, many bridges (a number of which are still in use), steam ships and other things.

He was an astonishing engineer and well worth learning more about, but I think you should read other books about him rather then this one.

This was difficult to follow. Sometimes the story was told as an excerpt from a popular book, sometimes by the third person narrator, sometimes in Kirk's memories and sometimes in his dreams.
I also had to backtrack sometimes to remember which of several times and a couple of timelines
we were in.
I'm glad I read it but I wouldn't recommend it very much

This is a pretty standard boys adventure from the 1950's. Two kids in Australia end up on a trip to the moon along with their dads. I read it on archive.org. Unlike many such books from the period, this put a lot of effort to be accurate. It was published close to 20 years before the first moon landing but a lot of it's descriptions of being on the moon were pretty good.
It slows down a bit when the author gives lectures on cosmic rays, collision probabilities, celestial mechanics and other topics, but this is the fun part because it's so rare in SF stories of the time to get any of this right.
I had fun reading it and reccomend it if you lie 50's SF