June 27, 2008
I'm most of the way through Nixonland, and happened upon this paragraph: (Part of a section describing Nixon's non-public actions to help secure his re-election in 1972) "Meanwhile there were the broadcast networks to flay - four of them, now...
June 20, 2008
I'm partway through Nixonland, and am liking it. Perlstein is trying to wind together a bunch of different strands (social, political, economic, generational, foreign policy, etc.) into a cohesive telling of the seismic shifts in American politics between 1966 and...
June 11, 2008
Does the internet ruin books? For me, no, but it has ruined video and/or TV. If I click on a video and it's more than a couple of minutes long, forget it. For example, this clip of Bill Moyers giving...
June 05, 2008
Since I know some of you who check us out are Michael Chabon fans, I thought I'd mention that last night I finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union. It's not my favorite Chabon ever, but it is quite good. It was...
May 08, 2008
It's a good book on why US foreign and national security policies have gone off the rails in recent years. The core point seems to be this (p.192): The great divide in thinking about American foreign policy today is not...
So since I'm feeling sickly this week and can only talk for limited periods (allergies - bad bad allergies) I figured it was a good night to stay in and read Prince Caspian again in preparation for next week's release...
April 03, 2008
My most recent novel was this award winner (its honors include the National Book Award) by Richard Powers. While not my favorite Powers, it's a very fine novel, and deals with some interesting questions about who any one of us...
March 25, 2008
Last night I finished reading another Murakami novel, his latest novel, After Dark. It's the fourth novel of his I've read, and the fourth I've very much enjoyed. It's not as grand or sweeping as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or...
March 19, 2008
I suppose we should note the passing of one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th century. Childhood's End was one of my favorite novels when I was a teenager....
March 15, 2008
I seem to have an affinity (addiction) to paper magazines. I get a warm feeling having actual knowledge delivered to my house every week/month. And relatively cheaply, too. Yglesias and Ezra Klein (bigger blogs than this) started a conversation specifically...
February 28, 2008
This sounds like an interesting book. From studying 500 Islamic terrorists Sageman sees them fitting into 3 waves, and an awareness of the changes in who the terrorists are should guide how we deal with them. The first wave of...
This sounds like an interesting book. From studying 500 Islamic terrorists Sageman sees them fitting into 3 waves, and an awareness of the changes in who the terrorists are should guide how we deal with them. The first wave of...
February 04, 2008
As Emptywheel notes, this is a big deal, and definitely calls the commission's work into question, no matter what Isikoff says....
Last week I finished reading Toobin's The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. And if you know people who are interested in the Court's workings and its recent ideological shifts, but who don't know a great deal...
December 29, 2007
When he's not playing the accordian for The Magnetic Fields, or writing ghastly, amusing children's tales as Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler writes rather more adult oriented fiction. His The Basic Eight is one of my favorite books ever. Adverbs didn't...
December 12, 2007
Pratchett has Alzheimer's....
December 01, 2007
Just an informational post: I found this website which is keeping track of a whole mess of "best of 2007" lists. Everything from books to music to architecture to stereo components. It's a work-in-progress, so new stuff gets added all...
November 18, 2007
While I don't know that the last section of the book was really necessary, I very much liked Jennifer Egan's The Keep, even more than her Look at Me, which I also enjoyed. It's a little complicated to describe, so...
November 15, 2007
There are a couple of excellent discussions happening in the IR-o-sphere, one regarding graduate degrees and the other about Dani Rodrik's new book [Warning, NSFNG]. First, a discussion going between the Duck of Minerva and Lawyers Guns and Money, with...
November 03, 2007
The last novel I finished was this book by Richard Flanagan. The fantastic tales, wonder, and mundane eternities are captured in the review at the link. And they are quite interesting. But to me it's his writing that really makes...
October 20, 2007
So I finally finished reading my non-fiction book of the moment this morning, Akhil Reed Amar's The Constitution: A Biography. It's a superb piece of work that I should buy at some point. I learned a great deal about both...
October 11, 2007
So Doris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize in LIterature. Huh. I was sort of thinking they'd go for a poet this year, and hoping they'd go for Margaret Atwood (out of the names that are often discussed as potential...
October 09, 2007
Given how the The Golden Compass ends I was perplexed how they were going to turn it into a blockbuster that would make a fortune and attract millions of children. Now I know - they've chopped off that part of...
September 29, 2007
On the one hand this sounds like just my sort of thing. Ah, the Oxbridge college. The plink of croquet balls, the twist of black ties, the splash of the Cam over your punt pole. Some might wish that world...
August 17, 2007
So yesterday I finished the bit of fiction I'd been reading for the last few weeks. Now I've finished my latest non-work nonfiction, Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy. Though he has of course been a keen commentator on US politics for...
August 16, 2007
I have now read two of David Mitchell's novels, and while I didn't like this one as much as Black Swan Green, it's still very good. It would seem that Mitchell's ever-rising reputation is justified....
July 24, 2007
Just finished it moments ago. All in all I liked it, but I think the series peaks in books 3-5, and I think the last third of it suffers from some rather severe structural problems. And I truly loathed the...
June 20, 2007
So I finished the David Mitchell novel I'd been reading - and it's really good. If you think you might be interested in it, here's the book's website....
May 09, 2007
So I finally read Linda Greenhouse's book on Justice Blackmun. As she explicitly states at the start of the text, it's not a traditional biography, nor is it comprehensive study of the justice's years on the nation's highest Court. It's...
April 12, 2007
His death was reported by the publisher Morgan Entrekin, a longtime family friend, who said Mr. Vonnegut suffered brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago....
February 12, 2007
I've been eagerly awaiting reading this book. Greenburg might not be Dahlia Lithwick (the Court reporter Armand worships), but she's one of the top Court reporters in the country, and she had an astonishing level of access to executive branch...
January 31, 2007
When Jackson choose to exert his will, things could get ugly. And sadly his love of his own power (and his disrespect for the liberty of others and the rule of law) set a precedent that has affected the country...
January 29, 2007
Really stupid. Really really really stupid. Others can tear his whining to shreds for the blatant inaccuracies and dishonesty that are present in it. But I want to highlight a ridiculous assertion he makes near the end of his "why...
January 18, 2007
In an attempt to provide content around here while Binky and armand are away, I'll do a book related post. I've done book reviews here in the past, but this will be a list of the books I've got stacked...
December 10, 2006
For any of you interested in Saudi, ARAMCO, or the US-Saudi relationship, Robert Vitalis has a new book, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, that is getting rave reviews and much discussion over at Qahwa Sada. If it's...
November 25, 2006
Painful Choices: A Theory of Foreign Policy Change is worth your time if you hope to be able to understand foreign policy, and more to the point, fluctuations in foreign policy. It's almost two books in one as the opening...
November 24, 2006
I look forward to seeing Baltar's results. What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You're probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are...
October 06, 2006
"State of Denial," page 254. It was all Bremer's fault. No, seriously. That's the claim that the people Woodward interviews are making. A remarkably large number of people are going on record (again, both directly and indirectly) as saying that...
October 05, 2006
State of Denial, by Woodward, page 179. This is really a facinating book. It's very different from "Bush at War" and "Plan of Attack" (previous books by Woodward; the first about Afghanistan, the second about Iraq up to the day...
I'm on page 71 of "State of Denial" by Woodward. Rumsfeld has managed to be a complete idiot once, and a partial idiot twice. Chronologically, we haven't even gotten to August, 2001. Gonna be a long book. (Oh, Woodward's usual...
October 04, 2006
Or, Harry Potter is evil, part 10,376: Laura Mallory, a mother of four, told a hearing officer for the Gwinnett County Board of Education on Tuesday that the popular fiction books are an ''evil'' attempt to indoctrinate children in the...
August 30, 2006
The author of the fabulous Cairo Trilogy has passed away, after a long life and brilliant writing career: Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels depicting Egyptian life in...
August 22, 2006
I think I'll definitely be reading this book. It appears to be a fascinating examination of the current conflict between the United States and Iran, with a focus on highly negative images of the other, constructed national identities, and misperpereptions...
August 17, 2006
So after finishing this Haruki Murakami novel published in 1994 I searched around to read what others have written about it, and honestly I don't think many of the reviews get it quite right. But this line on it Amazon...
August 07, 2006
If I had $75 to spare I'd likely buy this book. I'm neither a trained historian nor a political philosopher, so if you want a quick description of what this book's really about and where it fits in current philosophical...
July 23, 2006
If any of you are interested in a good, fast read on Lebanon during an Israeli invasion, and US/Israeli interactions during such an event, I recomend John Boykin's Cursed is the Peacemaker. It's primarily the tale of Phil Habib, when...
June 27, 2006
Let the prognostications of death and destruction begin (just as Professor Trelawney would want it)! Who is Rowling going to kill off in Book 7?...
June 04, 2006
The Golden Compass might have been slightly better as a novel, taken individually. But The Subtle Knife has what you want in the middle book in a three book series - growth in the themes and stylization, intriguing new characters,...
May 27, 2006
This post from Drezner is almost a week old, but I figured I'd link to it in case you were interested in taking a stroll through the comments thread before picking out some summer beach reading. The question is what's...
May 19, 2006
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know examines who makes decisions, how they make decisions, what good judgment is and what types of people show the best ‘judgment”. If you are interested in these questions,...
May 17, 2006
Okay, I am going to have to read books 2 & 3 in the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman because book 1 (The Golden Compass)was quite good. This book is mostly an adventure story that sets up the...
May 01, 2006
I read Five Days in Philadelphia (by Charleston native Charles Peters) over the weekend. I was under the impression that the history was focused upon how Wendell Willkie secured the Republican nomination for president in 1940. It starts off that...
April 10, 2006
This post was originally titled "Packer and McMaster", but "Awesome" is much better. No one will understand either title of this post, but it just follow me here. George Packer writes for the New Yorker. He is a journalist who...
April 07, 2006
Ilya Somin has this post on the fact that many science fiction and fantasy books, regardless of the personal ideological beliefs of their authors, feature a common opposition to centralized forms of government....
April 06, 2006
I've assigned Woodward's Bush at War as required reading a number of times. It's obviously very easy for students to get through, and it raises a host of questions that spark debates about the sources of foreign policy. But I've...
April 05, 2006
Sunday night I finished reading Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, what I must presume is the finest biography of “the founder of American government” yet written. It’s a remarkable piece of historical writing and analysis, and if you are interested in...
March 30, 2006
I really don't get the fuss about Francis Fukuyama's latest book. To me, many of the ideas in it are pretty obvious (but then I always thought going to war in March 2003 was a bad idea). And in terms...
January 31, 2006
If you want to raise your IQ, or win some money on TV game shows, go check out the hundred best first lines from novels (via tbogg). It is unclear what the criteria for this is. Makes you want to...
January 22, 2006
The Folding Star is the third of Alan Hollinghurst’s novels that I have read. This one and The Swimming Pool Library are fine. More than fine really, since Hollinghurst’s prose is magnificent – The New Republic has described it as...
January 19, 2006
It'll be some time before I can give it the full attention it deserves, but from having read only about half of it I can already recommend (and very highly recommd at that) this examination of Abraham Lincoln and his...
January 11, 2006
And this is a prime example: Random House will refund readers who bought James Frey's drug and alcohol memoir "A Million Little Pieces" directly from the publisher, a move believed to be unprecedented, after the author was accused of exaggerating...
December 19, 2005
Saw a comment about this book today: PICTURE THIS: A folksy, self-consciously plainspoken Southern politician rises to power during a period of profound unrest in America. The nation is facing one of the half-dozen or so of its worst existential...
December 17, 2005
Although, I was considering titling this post "We're Fucked," since amongst the three of us who study war, revolution, authoritarianism, political leadership and the middle east, our book list is a lot more scary that some undergrad at UMass-Darmouth working...
October 29, 2005
The plot of this novel, the second by Jonathan Safran Foer, centers on the reaction of nine year old Oskar Schell to his father’s death on 9/11. But really it deals with the aftermath of tragedy and painfully strained relationships...
October 13, 2005
I agree with Will Baude. If you are going to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to an aging British playwright, Pinter wouldn't have been my choice....
September 30, 2005
I've already praised his work on the blog twice before, so it should come as no surprise that I continue to love everything I read by Haruki Murakami. If you've got the September 26 issue of The New Yorker, I...
September 29, 2005
It suddenly hit me today that just hours after rereading The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse, I bought The Book of Bunny Suicides. Am I suddenly so unnerved by the cotton-tailed critters that I hope they choose to brutally...
We've been tagged in the meme of the week. My limited results in the extended entry....
September 26, 2005
This book by Franklin Foer is, frankly, not all I hoped it would be. This is an incredibly rich area for research, but this text comes off as a breezy tome, focused more on what soccer represents and how it's...
September 11, 2005
It occurs to me that I haven't posted in quite some time on the fiction I've been reading lately, so here are a few brief thoughts on three novels. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is excellent and I recommend...
August 16, 2005
Apparently, we share the same personality type. We are both INTPs according to the Myers-Briggs Typology.Harry Potter Personality Quiz by Pirate Monkeys Inc....
August 15, 2005
I largely agree with Jesse. I think. Organizing book stores on the basis of the personal characteristics of the author is, at the very least, confusing. Just what do you do with the works of James Baldwin in stores like...
July 20, 2005
It was good. Rowling certainly has a way with building a story and ingeniously inserting all kinds of details in creating her own (or Harry's own) universe. I didn't like it as much as Order of the Phoenix, a few...
July 13, 2005
Yesterday I was sitting on my back porch thinking that there is no greater solitary pleasure than reading. [you, with your minds in the gutter. stop it.] A few seconds later I felt guilty and elitist for thinking that, remembering...
June 21, 2005
The Last Valley, by Martin Windrow, was named by the Economist as one of the best books of 2004. It is primarily a discussion of the military defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, but like any...