Patrick Lam

Thoughts and travels of Patrick Lam

Book review: Wellington's Railways: Colonial Steam to Matangi, by David Parsons

David Parsons. Wellington’s Railways: Colonial Steam to Matangi. 2010. This book is certainly not lacking in detail. It covers the early development of Wellington region rail (different parts of New Zealand, and I guess many other countries, were quite isolated 150 years ago) until 1920; refinements from 1920 to 1970; and the changes from 1970 to 2010. Wellington rail did manage to mostly hang on through the global Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Sunday, October 8, 2023

Review: Flight of the Huia by Kerry-Jayne Wilson

A review of a 2004 book about NZ ecology, ecosystems, and species endemic to NZ.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Monday, September 4, 2023

Book review: Before the Dawn by Tōson Shimazaki

A review of the Great Japanese Novel, which describes the life of village chief Aoyama Hanzō along a main highway through the opening of Japan to the world and the Meiji Restoration. Kind of the anti-It’s-a-Wonderful-World as he realizes that his efforts didn’t bear much fruit.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Thursday, May 18, 2023

Book review: Overload by Kelly and Moen

I was wandering through a Wellington City Library branch and picked up Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It by Erin L. Kelly and Phyllis Moen, a book published March 2020. I don’t usually read management books but I am interested in how people work in 2021; work-life balance was cited in Minister Navdeep Bains’s recent resignation, for instance (of course it always is for politicians), and discussed in a Globe and Mail Opinion.

Posted by Patrick Lam on Thursday, January 14, 2021

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Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo; patrick.lam@uwaterloo.ca

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