Milo and the Calf

Tag: recommended for the enthusiast

  • Review: Pelecanos’s Hell to Pay

    Hell to Pay: A Derek Strange Novel (Derek Strange Novels) George Pelecanos The second book in Pelecanos’s series about P.I. Derek Strange and his sidekick Terry Quinn. Probably even better than the first, this one has less silly shoot ‘em up scenes and more of the grime that is crime in South East D.C. as…

  • Review: Davis’s In Praise of Barbarians

    ed note: originally written for the now defunct Left Turn magazine. In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire Mike Davis I am writing this review as Southern California burns and I cannot help wondering what Mike Davis, the great social critic of Los Angeles, is thinking right now. Mike Davis is among the best of left wing…

  • Review: Taleb’s Black Swan

    The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: “On Robustness and Fragility” (Incerto) Nassim Nicolas Taleb The book every trader/i-banker/finance nerd had to read. The thesis of this is pretty much the same as Taleb’s earlier work – we discount the chances and effects of the random or…

  • Review: Pelecanos’s Right as Rain

    Right As Rain: A Derek Strange Novel (Derek Strange Novels) George Pelecanos Pelecanos is the great chronicler of our nation’s capital (Washington, D.C.) as it is lived by its actual citizens. For a crime writer who works in place and character, he is top of his game. This is the first of Pelecanos’s series chronicling…

  • Review: Littell’s The Company

    The Company: A Novel of the CIA Robert Littell A better than average page-turner spy novel tracing the history of the agency through the stories of a group of men who come into it as it was being formed and end up in the upper reaches of the organization. Clearly based on real guys, some…

  • Review: Baer’s See No Evil

    See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism Robert Baer Did you see Syriana? Well, Clooney’s character is allegedly based on Baer. If that’s true, it doesn’t seem to be a very accurate portrayal. What I got out of this book was not the story of a…

  • Review: Piven and Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements

    Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail Frances Fox Piven, Richard Cloward The classic Marxist tract every undergraduate leftist must read. Basically, by looking at specific case studies, including labor struggles and the civil rights movement, Piven and Cloward argue that poor people’s movements grow and flourish when they are amorphous and lead…

  • Review: Defoe’s Moll Flanders

    Moll Flanders: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Penguin Classics) Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders is a bleak read. Everyone is pretty fucking awful. Moll herself can be read in numerous ways. She is a conniving, evil, women, brought low by her sins (this is arguably the way Defoe meant to portray her).…

  • Review: Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas

    What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America Thomas Frank This is one of the most read (or at least most discussed) political commentary texts of 2000s. It seems like everyone I know is familiar with the thesis – that Kansas is an example of what is strange (and Frank thinks,…

  • Review: Evan’s and Pollock’s Ireland for Beginners

    Ireland for Beginners Phil Evans and Eileen Pollock A comic book telling of the history of Ireland. This is from the early days of the “beginners” series, when the books were still still crudely drawn and had a distinctly left political character. This one lets its politics show by being largely sympathetic to the Irish…