Milo and the Calf

Tag: books

  • Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

    Giovanni’s RoomJames Baldwin When I was in my twenties, this was a favorite book of a number of friends. I don’t know why I never read it. This is Baldwin at the height of his powers writing with a kind of restraint that makes the themes of the novel even more explosive. I’m not literary…

  • Review: Morrison’s Sula

    SulaToni Morrison Morrison’s second novel. Like every one of her works that I have read, it’s a masterpiece. I really have nothing new to say about one of America’s greatest novelists except to say that what stuck me about Sula was how fully formed the characters are, even those whose appearances are brief, and how…

  • 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…