If you enjoyed the lyrical language of the letters read in Ken Burn's Civil War series, you cannot help but relish the prose of this novel. Some who have started Cold Mountain tell me that they could just not get into it; however, that was not my case. While the adventures of the main character may not be exactly a page-turner, the tale relates so much about the civil-war era and the lives of its people, that, as a historical novel, I found it a fine read.

The story follows a young man from North Carolina who has survived the major battles of the Civil War, but winds up in a hospital with a severe wound across the neck. One day he decides that he has had enough of war and simply walks away from the hospital heads to home on foot. Home is Cold Mountain, situated in the North Carolina Smokeys. The other half of the story is about the main reason this man is headed home. It is a woman (naturally). She is the daughter of a minister. She grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, but her widowed father took a post at Cold Mountain and moved them from sophisticated city to simple country farm. The father recently passed away and the city-girl daughter is determined to stay and run the farm. The novel is enriched by the characters that both the young woman and man encounter.

Those of you who have visited other parts of this site may know that while visiting the Middle East, I was the victim of an act of terror. I turned 50. As it turned out, just about anything that ever was wrong with me physically (flu, bad back, etc.) happened on my big five oh! Thank God I was in a place where everything was a millennium or two older than me. Two gifts saved the day. Heather and Lisa gave me a tee shirt in Hebrew from Ben and Jerry's and Ellen gave me a copy of Dave Barry Turns 50.

Dave Barry's wit has not dimmed with age. I took a reality check on this matter. I find that Lisa thinks Dave's a riot as well. He spans the generations like rock and roll and silly putty (Silly what?). (That was a test to screen the Boomer and Gen X from the Gen Y, Z and MC square. If you passed, please continue. If you did not, you may resume you search for the Star Wars web site you were looking for. We now resume our regularly scheduled book review.)

Dave Barry takes the reader through each year from 1949 on, so one could consider this a history of sorts, the sorts that the film genius Mel Brooks does so well. And he does this by (I am not making this up) mentioning Buffalo Bob only 47 times.

OK, so if you like Dave Barry, be sure to get this book. If you don't care for him, why are you reading this review? No, no, come back here. Only joking.

I have the pleasure of meeting stars of Silicon Valley. I have talked with Bill Gates on several occasions, dined with Philippe Kahn, and chatted with Steve Jobs. Each is a completely unique personality from the other. Steve impresses me as the charming bad boy of the group. Gates is the most average Joe. (Business genius is sometimes still waters running deep.) One who is missing from my collection is Larry Ellison of Oracle. From the impression I gather in The Difference between Larry Ellison and God, Ellison is the bad-boy of the lot, with Steve Jobs taking a distant second.

I think we all may have met a Larry Ellison. He's the one in the office that spends a great deal of time talking and little time doing. From the employment history of the man, he wins no prizes. Yet, it is Ellison that doggedly pushes a theme in a market.

Ellison and his friends took a look at something IBM was developing and seized an opportunity. That something was the relational database. For the non-geek, a relational database uses the idea that data can be stored in a series of tables and referenced to each other. For example, you may have names and social security numbers in one table and social security numbers and salaries in another. In the old days, these two tables would be separate databases. You would have to look up a social security number in one and input it in the other to find a salary. The relational database allows you to ask for the salary without leaving the first database. This technique speeds things up.

Ellison got a relational database product to market first. That product was Oracle. It was not a very good product but there were certain customers who had such a hunger for a relational product that they bought it. Ellison appears to epitomize the common theme of Silicon Valley to promise big and deliver little. There is a common saying in IT (Information Technology) departments. It is "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM." There are stories in the book about people getting fired buying Oracle.

However, with all the business angles aside, Ellison's life makes for a good read. He is living large. He competitively sails yachts and lives in a house fashioned after a samurai's. As of the book's printing Larry had been married and divorced three times. I will remember that wife two says that Larry ruined her for other men. Interesting.

Bottom line report: This is not a business book. It is a good read about a colorful character.

OK, so my reading lately has been Silicon Valley biography. However, America Online is a hometown firm, I have met a number of its people including Ted Leonsis who just bought our hockey team, and I wanted to know more about its founder, Steve Case. Hence, the AOL story. Unlike the Larry Ellison book, this is more on the company than the man.

There are many modern tech companies that seem to be nothing but good news. AOL is not one of them. Its story reads like a company constantly on the brink. The online industry has been one surprise trend after another. The Internet, who knew? Yet AOL hangs on. And prospers.

What better segue than to move from modern day titans to those of the nineteenth century. Actually, my delight in this biography is more the era than the man. It is the Northern industrial counterpoint to Cold Mountain's Southern rural. I find what happened in the root development of modern American a story little told, but told well here.