Tag: 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: 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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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: 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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Some Quick Thoughts on Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
You know those books where you start reading and there, in the very first pages, is a phrase you just have to underline or copy out? It’s so perfectly done, you need to honor it. But then you keep reading, and just a page later, there’s another perfect sentence. And then another. Now you’re underlying something…
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Digging in the Stacks: False Nationalism / False Internationalism
This is the first post in an occasional series I’ll be doing called Digging in the Stacks. I’ll write about books I find fascinating. This piece was originally written for another website I used to manage. False Nationalism False Internationalism (herein after“FNFI”) by E Tani and Kae Sera is a cult classic of the American hard left. Originally published in…
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Book Nerds: Richard Prince
A series on interesting book collectors and readers. Richard Prince is among my favorite of contemporary artists. His Marlboro Man changed the way I thought about art and his autographed photos remain among the high points of New York clever school of art. Prince’s work is now amongst the most expensive by a living artist.…
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2014: My Year in Books
I’m still not really sure how this happened, but in 2014, I read 52 books. I’ve tracked every book I’ve read for the last 26 years, and 52 books is a record. I’m sadly proud of this. A couple of things certainly helped. First, I finished a long-term goal of reading the complete works of…
Milo and the Calf 