Author: seanv2
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Review: McAuley’s Quiet War
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley Fans of science fiction often try to place works in the genre into one or more subcategories. It is “space opera” or it is “cyberpunk”; it is “steam punk” or it is “military SF”. It is “Hard SF” or “New Wave”. These distinctions can be helpful to the reader picking…
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Review: The Quiet War
The Quiet War, Paul McAuley Fans of science fiction often try to place works in the genre into one or more subcategories. It is “space opera” or it is “cyberpunk”; it is “steam punk” or it is “military SF”. It is “Hard SF” or “New Wave”. These distinctions can be helpful to the reader picking…
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No king but Jesus
To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davison Hunter, Oxford University Press (2010). One of the major paradoxes of contemporary American politics is that Christians have never been more organized specifically as Christians, and yet the goals of their various agendas – from alleviating poverty…
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Remaindered: Books that don’t quite belong
(First in an occasional series, in which the odder fringes of my library are hauled out into the light for the edification of the public.) Don’t Make Me Go Back, Mommy: A Child’s Book About Satanic Ritual Abuse, Doris Sanford and Graci Evans, Multnomah Press, Portland (1990). One of the most headline-grabbing social fears…
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Training Totals Week of 2.20.2011
RECAP: Finally feel like I am on the mend. I had a pretty decent performance this weekend at the Prospect Park Cherry Tree Ten Miler. I had set an arbitrary goal of 1:24:00, I ended up coming in at 1:20:49. Foot hurt for most of the rest of the night, but it is feeling fine…
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Acquisitions: Week of 2-20-11
I feel like this is some kind of Tweet Your Weight-esque exercise in public shaming, because the last two weeks make it look like I do nothing except buy books that I will never be able to read. This week, though, there were special circumstances: an order from a month ago showed up on my…
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Acqusitions Week of 2.20.2011
Death in a City of Mystics (Prime Crime Mysteries), Janice Steinberg, Berkley (1998) – Found on the street. Seriously. Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, Karel van der Toorn, Harvard University Press (2009) – Amazon. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, NYU (2003) – Amazon…
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Adolf Hitler, magic yoga spaceman
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, New York University Press (2002). Few things are more tedious in political discussion than accusations that some politician or party is analogous to the German National Socialist Workers Party, more commonly known as the Nazis. Intended as the ultimate discrediting putdown,…
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The loneliness of the library book sale
Library book sales always leave me with an almost physical sense of sadness, a kind of psychic fatigue that settles over me as as soon as I glimpse those tables with discarded books from unknown homes all lined up like judgmental ex-lovers. Many book people love these events, savoring the chance to spelunk in the…
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Thinking of Boston
The change in the Boston Qualifying times really woke me up out of my winter work out slumber. As regular readers of this blog know, I would very much like to BQ, but I am very far away from that goal. With the new qualifying times, this is a goal that just got a lot…
Milo and the Calf 