Milo and the Calf

Tag: book reviews

  • Review: Mantel’s Wolf Hall

    Wolf HallHilary Mantel The plan was to wait until all three books came out and then read them one right after the other. As other reviews this year will make clear, that didn’t happen. One down, two to go. This, Mantel’s first book on Cromwell is, you are not surprised to hear, brilliant. The writing…

  • Review: Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

    What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Huruki Murakami Why did it take me so long to read this delightful little book? Perhaps because while I admire Murakami’s fiction, I don’t really like it. This book has a certain oddness to it, it is so straight forward, filled with such short, careful, deliberative,…

  • Review: Barry’s The Great Influenza

    The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History John Barry Started this book right in the heart of it. Mid-April, New York City. Only leaving the apartment late at night to run around an empty Prospect Park. This is an incredible work, both a detail history of the greatest modern pandemic before…

  • Review: Carney’s The Wedge

    The Wedge: Evolution, Consciousness, Stress, and the Key to Human ResilienceScott Carney New book by the author of two really good books What Doesn’t Kill Us about showman and actual real life health guru Wim Hof, and the Enlightenment Trap about the tragic death of mystic lead astray Ian Thorson. This new one, the Wedge,…

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    Review: Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts

    In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s BerlinErik Larson Dad book all the way dealing with that most dad book of dad book times, World War II, specifically Hitler’s rise to power as seen through the eyes of the American diplomat William Dodd and his family. This is an…

  • Review: Tanner’s Babbling Corpse

    Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts Grafton Tanner An odd little book on the rise of vaporwave and what it means for our current culture that some of the most subversive music being made in the 2010s was, basically, the hold music for 1980s corporate America. I knew basically nothing about Vaporwave until…

  • Caro’s The Power Broker

    The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New YorkRobert Caro I mean, how do you write a review of a work of genius? Who cares what I think about perhaps the greatest work of nonfiction in the last fifty years? If you care about New York, or governance, or how to avoid turning…

  • Review: Ord’s The Precipice

    The Precipice: Existential Risks and the Future of HumanityTony Ord An odd and fascinating little book written by one of the leading forces in effective altruism, the Precipice is an attempt to catalogue and rate true existential crises facing humanity. We’re not taking about inconveniences, here, we’re talking ending human life kind of stuff. We’re…

  • Larson’s Splendid and the Vile

    The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the BlitzErik Larson Dad lit. Read right when the pandemic was at its worst in NYC – the park completely empty on my late night runs, the sirens, constant. It was interesting to read a book on the Blitz and Churchill at…

  • Review: Nutt’s Drink

    Drink? The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health David Nutt Checked this out after it received glowing praise from Tyler Cowen and it was well worth it. Drink is an investigation into our relationship with alcohol and it’s historical importance, especially focused on England. But the main thrust of the book is a detailed investigation…