Tag: book reviews
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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…
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Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand
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 of the pivotal figures of the…
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Review: Goodrich-Clarke’s Black Sun
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke An overview of Nazi inspired right wing lunatics of the post World War II era, covering the heavy hitters and some lesser known individuals. It is a very well researched account of world for which it is difficult to get information, but…
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Before Bob Avakian was a punchline
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che, by Max Elbaum. Verso: London, 2006. Today, when the U.S. left consists of little more than Barbara Ehrenreich, a couple of blogs, and an anarchist burrito stand or two, it’s hard to imagine a time when the left was so vast and powerful…
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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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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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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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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,…
Milo and the Calf 