Category: Books
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Review: Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God
When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome Richard E. Rubenstein From the perspective of a modern westerner, it is hard to understand how amorphous the early Christian movements were. In the first few hundred years after the death of Christ, much of what we now take for…
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Review: Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
Titus Andronicus (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series) William Shakespeare Is this the most disturbing of Shakespeare’s plays? If it isn’t, it is close. Titus Andronicus returns from war, triumphant, but his cruelty to his captive, Tamora, queen of the Goths, sets of a spiral of increasingly horrific acts of vengeance. The violence is copious and horrific:…
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Review: Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein In my final year of law school, Nudge was the book that was under every policy wonk’s arm. It’s not surprising that in the early days of the Obama administration, the khaki’ed masses of Du Pont circle wanted to read the first…
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2010: My Year in Books
Note: I am in the long, slow process of moving the many, many things I’ve written for various other blogs/ websites. livejournals, etc over here. I’m not moving everything, but if its something of substance, or something I want to remember, it’s getting a home here. As my post on every book I read in…
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Milo in the News
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a lot more people are getting to this website by searching some variation of “Milo and the bull”, Milo and the calf”, Milo of Croton”, etc. I wasn’t sure why it was happening. Perhaps final papers in freshman intro to classics class were due? Was Milo mentioned…
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Review: Ellroy’s Cold Six Thousand
The Cold Six Thousand James Ellroy The Cold Six Thousand is the second volume of Ellroy’s “Underworld Trilogy” tracing the history of 1960s America through the lives of real and imagined gangsters. Written in an intense staccato style, the books are filled with conspiracies, bad men behaving horribly, and real and imagined dirt on most…
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Review: Mosley’s Long Fall
The Long Fall Walter Mosley Crime novels are very grounded in place. George Pelacanos’s novels sing of DC; Laura Lippman’s of Baltimore of Los Angeles, and until recently, Walter Mosley’s most famous crime novels were set in Watts. For the last decade of so the heavy hitters of crime fiction have mostly been avoiding New…
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Review: Jurek’s Eat and Run
Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness Scott Jurek Its rare that I’m without a book, but it happens. Last summer, it happened when I was on vacation in Vermont. Little dude was sleeping better than expected, and I had more time to read, so low and behold, three days into a seven…
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Review: Hampton Sides’ In the Kingdom of Ice
In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette In the late 19th century, we still had no fucking clue what was going on in the artic. For example, many smart people thought the North Pole had a temperate climate and was covered by an open sea. Wild life…
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Review: You Are An Ironman by Jacques Steinberg
You Are an Ironman: How Six Weekend Warriors Chased Their Dream of Finishing the World’s Toughest Tr iathlon As the subtitle suggests, You Are An Ironman traces the stories of six age groupers as they train for, and race, Ironman Arizona. Given my obsession with mortals attempting events of long distance, and the fact that…
Milo and the Calf 