Category: Books
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Review: Militias in America 1995: A Book of Reading and Resources
Militias in America 1995: A Book of Reading and Resources Institute of Alternative Journalism I spent much of my twenties working, and volunteering in various bookstores. There’s much I don’t miss about those days the low pay, the drudgery, the customer service; but there are other parts of that life I remember fondly. One of…
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Review: Palmer’s Seven Surrenders
Seven Surrenders Ada Palmer The second book in Ada Palmers incredible Terra Ignota series. This one picks off exactly where Too Like the Lightning ended, and moves along at a blistering clip through scores of plot revelations, and extended explorations into the nature of gender, the place of violence in society, the complexities of competing…
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Book Review: Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI David Grann This is a story of a mass murder. The murdered were members of the Osage tribe of Native Americans, who, for a host of complex reasons tied to U.S.’s horrific treatment of Native Americans, ended up inexplicably wealthy owners…
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Review: Goldstein’s Janesville: AN American Story
The story of what happens to a small town in the industrial Midwest when the primary employer (here, an auto plant) closes down. We all know the broad outline of how this goes down – the fight to keep the plant open eventually fails, and the town spirals down economically. But how the town changes,…
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Review: Desmond’s Evicted
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City Matthew Desmond An examination into how housing insecurity leads to general insecurity and upends lives. A brilliant book. It follows a number of different people in the Milwaukee area struggling with housing issues and uses their stories, and plenty of social science, to tell explain the way…
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Review Foer’s Moonwalking With Einstein
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything Joshua Foer I read a lot of these experiential journalism books. Some of these are call-in jobs that would have been better as a magazine article, but many, including this one (and Cork Dork), are entertaining edutainment in which a pretty smart person gets to…
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Review: Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman
Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman Minoo Dinshaw A seven hundred page biography of a now largely forgotten historian named Steven Runciman. Why I picked this up, I’m not sure. Why I enjoyed it as much as I did is also a bit of a mystery. Runciman, who wrote a wildly popular…
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Review Kolhatkar’s Black Edge: nside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street Sheelah Kolhatkar High brow business tell all gossip about the rise and (kinda) fall of one of the most successful hedge managers of all time, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital. Cohen, if you don’t know, ran…
Milo and the Calf 