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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Pure platinum-group metals - Classic Zubrin, only more so., December 4, 2008
This review is from: How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet (Paperback)
Once again, Zubrin delights and informs like no other. This concise, easy-reading, laugh-out-loud, little volume is packed with more solid scientific and engineering information about Mars, Mars exploration and settlement than even "The Case for Mars." Whereas the latter was informative and interesting, but fairly straight-laced, Zubrin here takes a decidedly more lighthearted approach, creating a fictional, early 22nd century guide to surviving and thriving on the new frontier.
As usual, Zubrin's strongest suit is his ability to turn his caustic wit against the foolish, timid, bureaucratic, cowardly, thoughtless paralysis which presently cripples the aerospace establishment, and indeed, Zubrin suggests, the entirety of terrestrial "civilization" (if what we have down here still merits the term.) Perhaps my favorite example is the following passage detailing water reclamation from the exhaust of a space suit's methanol/oxygen fuel-cell (used to provide electric power) in order to extend the endurance of Martians on EVA.
"The water you obtain will include a significant quantity of carbon dioxide in solution, which is why NASA has banned systems that plumb fuel-cell wastewater directly back to the suit canteen. However, despite the claimed medical problem, it is a fact that in the twentieth century, many people chose to drink carbonated water as a matter of preference."
I do not hold with those who regard Zubrin's political asides as an interruption of an otherwise interesting presentation of scientific or engineering information. Zubrin's ability to decisively skewer folly of all sorts, technical, medical, political, social, is the primary reason that he has always impressed me, and in my opinion, constitutes the single best feature of this particular book.
Zubrin's brutal and sustained critique of bureaucracy toward the end of "How to Live on Mars" is positively brilliant. If it doesn't make you yearn to give up the soul-destroying stagnation and conformity of Earth to live on a planet full of misfits, outcasts and rugged individualists, then there's just simply no trace of idealism, romance, nobility or heroism left in your black, flabby, little heart.
I'm pleased to see Zubrin take such a radical turn, or maybe simply to more openly embrace the radicalism which he has never been able to entirely prevent from seeping into his work. This one is not going to win Zubrin any friends in high places, but I suspect it will contribute to the immortality he achieves when the Martians (descended from pioneers who will make the first crossings in Mars-Direct inspired spacecraft) finally throw off their tyrannical Earthling overlords and establish a truly civilized branch of humanity for the first time in far too long.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Hundreds of OCR Errors, poor value, avoid this Kindle Edition, April 20, 2009
Bob Zubrin really knows his stuff when it comes to the Red Planet. And here he gives us a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, projected look at the guidebook he would write for the wanna-be Mars immigrant of the late 21st century. That's cool. And it's fun and informative.
But that's the end of the good news. Here's the bad news.
1. This work is extremely short. It is barely more than novella-length. It is about half of the length of a "normal" best-selling novel. That's word count, not pages - the print edition must have pretty big type. And fully 5% of the "book" is a bullet list of the topics! The market value of a locked digital copy of a novella-length work is about $2, not $10. So this is a rip off in the basic sense of content-per-dollar.
2. The Kindle Edition is a trashed OCR scan that borders on unreadable and will drive you nuts. Starting halfway through the first chapter, a few random words or phrases in each sentence are in italics. I can't get my REVIEW to emulate THAT, so instead I'LL SHOW you by inserting some WORDS IN capitals TO emulate the problem. Don't YOU think this IS really irritating? IF it doesn'nt BOTHER YOU yet, then you haven't SEEN enough of IT and you'll just have TO take my WORD FOR it, it IS really annoying.
So how do I know it's OCR? Smoking gun: part of a caption reads "A/lost people look better in...". Classic and obvious OCR glitch: a flyspeck in the M caused it to mis-read "Most people.."; once it saw the first hump in the M as an A, it was lost in morphospace trying to assign some char values to the rest of the M! There are hundreds of other cases, in many of them it is quite difficult to work out what the actual text is supposed to be.
I have no idea why they did this stupid book trick. Clearly Zubrin did NOT type this on a Selectric and mail them a hardcopy typescript! Clearly they HAD a perfectly good digital copy to start with! So it took real incompetence to decide to put the print edition through OCR to get this. But then to not PROOFREAD IT AT ALL? If anyone had EVER read the edition released here, it could not have been released. Because it is absolute trash.
So it was not proofread - just OCR'd and heaved out the wire. Well, there are millions of Americans recently unemployed. And IMO everyone involved in producing this garbage Kindle Edition should be added to that roll call, at once.
ATTENTION ANGRY MARS FAITHFUL!
Zubrin wrote a good little book. And I'm a big Zubrin fan. In fact, some years back I met him in a social context that allowed me to have a treasured one-on-one conversation with him. But here I'm REVIEWING A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT AT A GIVEN PRICE. My review asserts my considered opinion that THIS PRODUCT AT THIS PRICE IS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE VALUE. Not that "we shouldn't go to Mars", or "Zubrin is terrible", or any other thing you want to impute other than what I just asserted. If you read the KINDLE VERSION OF THE BOOK and don't agree, by all means comment and/or post your own review, and explain your position. But spare us all from a hate campaign of "not helpful" votes from people who already made up their minds [if you already made up your mind about a book before you read a review and thus were not looking for 'help' then a not helpful vote is a LIE that pollutes the Amazon community!] and just want to "punish" speech they don't agree with, and from a stream of insulting comments that misrepresent what my review says.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mixes Science and humor., December 3, 2008
This review is from: How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet (Paperback)
Supposedly written by a Robert Zubrin born on Mars in the year 2071, when there are Martian settlements, this book mixes humor and science fact in a guidebook format.
Chapters include:
* How to Get to Mars
* How to Choose a Spacesuit
* How to Choose Your First Ground Rover
* How to Choose Your Homestead
* Choosing the Right Technology for Your Hab
* How to Save Money on Radiation Protection
* How to Stay Alive in the Desert
* How to Make Anything
* How to Grow Food (That is Actually Edible)
* How to get a Job that Pays Well and Doesn't Kill You
* How to Fly on Mars.
* How to Invest Your Savings
* How to Make Discoveries That Will Make you Famous
* How to Profit from the Terraforming Program
* How to be a Social Success on Mars
* How to Avoid Bureaucratic Persecution.
The book is an enjoyable, easy and quick read. You need not have a physics or engineering degree to understand it (I have both) and it is written for the layperson, which chapters with more technical content having warnings. I smirked at the jabs at NASA but ridicule is not my thing.
I'm not sure the last two chapters had much to add to the book. For example, in the social success chapter, the pick up lines were funny, but don't really say much about Mars. I would have rather had much more technical content than humor, but the book is what it is; and what it is is a book that everyone can enjoy.
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