Category: Uncategorized
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Remaindered: Books that don’t belong
Another installment in an occasional series about books in our libraries that embarrass, confuse or upset us. Today: the particular humor of our friends the police. Cop Jokes, Lou Savelli and Stuart Moss (Looseleaf Law Publication, Flushing NY, 2007). Lots of vocational groups have their own oral folklore, and jokes are a big part of…
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Acquisitions for the week of 2/27/11
Last week, I said no more new books, at least for a while. What a dismal failure. The continued death spiral of four nearby Borders is simply too tempting to a bargain-loving book jockey like myself. Below is this week’s intake. Antwerp, Roberto Bolañ0 (translated by Natasha Wimmer). New York: New Directions, 2010. Picked up…
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Review: Drazin’s Maimonides
Maimonides: Reason Above All Israel Drazin This is an odd little volume on the great Jewish thinker, the Rambam. Perhaps its worth a read for someone like me — a novice Jewish scholar. There is a lot of good introductory material here, but the book is kind of all over the place. Chapters focus on…
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Remaindered: Who Built The Moon?
Who Built The Moon? By Christopher Knight and Alan Butler (Watkins, 2007) It must be said that V. Charm is not the only one of us with disturbing books on his shelf. After “proving” that the moon had to have been construction by an intelligence, Knight and Butler offer three theories for its existence: the…
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Review: The Secret Temple: Masons, Mysteries and the Founding of America
The Secret Temple: Masons, Mysteries and the Founding of America by Peter Levenda (Continuum Books, 2009) A good introductory text to a subject is hard to find and with the subject of Freemasonry it is even more difficult. Freemasons take oaths to never divulge the secrets of the Society and (perhaps as a result of…
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Review: Maimonides: Reason Above All
Maimonides: Reason Above All by Israel Drazin This is an odd little volume on the great Jewish thinker, the Rambam. This book is worth a read for someone like me who is a novice Jewish scholar. There is a lot of good introductory material here, but the book is kind of all over the place.…
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Foxhill
Hello Internet, As you can see, I don’t really update this blog anymore. I’m still a ger, still learning about Judaism, and still blogging, but I am focusing my energies on my bookish blog The Fox Hill Review. Over there I and some friends write about books and all things bookish. I often discuss books…
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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…
Milo and the Calf 