April 08, 2010
A couple weeks ago I noticed a map that flies in the face of the narrative of the Democratic Party put forward by both the chattering class and a fair number of academics. I knew Jimmy Carter was strong in...
January 19, 2010
Robert B. Parker, creator of the Spenser series of detective fiction, died Monday at home. I was a fan of the Spenser books; not literature (in the sense of what is considered high art), but very well written, sparse, funny,...
January 11, 2010
I'm not sure why I'm disturbed by this, but I am. Renting textbooks? It's just....wrong. I don't know why. It just is....
October 06, 2009
Who will join the list of winners for Literature? We'll find out on Thursday. The bookmakers include several Americans among the favorites, but this is such a strange prize one never knows who will emerge with the award....
August 09, 2009
Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting piece in The New Yorker on the limits of Southern liberalism in the mid-20th century, focusing on how supposed liberals like Gov. "Big Jim" Folsom (D-AL) and fictional lawyer Atticus Finch were more willing than...
July 21, 2009
So as is always the case when I'm stuck spending bunches of hours in airplanes and on airliners I caught up on some fiction reading over the last week. So a few quick thoughts on my most recent reads. First,...
July 15, 2009
I'm away at a full-on Geek-Fest Summer Camp for a few weeks. It's an academic retreat that teaches security studies, with a specific focus on military strategy and operations. We spent a couple hours today arguing about Lee at Gettysburg,...
July 11, 2009
David Bernstein highlights a "scathing" review by Richard Epstein of Robert Bork's latest book, and in the resulting thread Bork finds notably few defenders - with many criticizing him as a terrible example of originalism, and some saying his haphazard...
July 01, 2009
Check it out! KCB's hubby got his book reviewed on boing boing!...
May 18, 2009
This book is not about the modern financial crash, but is instead about the global depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s (though the author has a short final chapter that tries to tie the present financial crisis to...
March 18, 2009
What the NYT Baghdad bureau is reading right now. Not completely cool, but moderately so....
January 30, 2009
A short amusement from Noah Baumbach....
December 12, 2008
Dear Media: I have noticed a recent trend in calling Obama's incoming Cabinet by an old phrase - "The Best and The Brightest." You should note that this phrase refers to a good book, but the book uses the phrase...
September 23, 2008
It is nice when political science can be applied to politics, and it's important to debunk popular arguments that appear to lack much of an empirical foundation....
September 14, 2008
So last night I ended up watching Gonzo (I'd give it a slight thumbs up) with some friends, after which one of them started talking about the topic of writers and artists and suicide. Kind of creepy to hear that...
September 01, 2008
I think that one thing that's often underestimated in terms of why national discourse, especially in the press, about national politics took such a right-leaning slant over the last few decades is the effect of The Almanac of American Politics....
August 13, 2008
Numbers 1 and 2 are pretty damn predictable, but an interesting list on the whole. And hey, it's given me an idea for my next reading diversion (#6)....
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...
June 18, 2005
Since I liked Manual Labor so much I decided that I would read another Busch novel - a quite different Busch novel. Historical dramas aren't usually what I reach for when I want to be alone with a good book,...
May 14, 2005
Out of the many (many, many, many, many ....) things I read on a regular basis, The New Yorker is always my top priority. Of course I adore New York, so I like to keep up on the major happenings...
March 28, 2005
A nasty sinus thing has taken over my body for the last several days, and the massive amounts of Benadryl I've been taking have left me too spacy for posting. Instead, I've been under blankies drinking gingerale and reading -...
March 21, 2005
The Booker (now Man Booker) Prize juries have never steered me wrong. I’ve read 4 of the last 15 winners and every one has been a superior work of fiction – Ondatje’s The English Patient, Roy’s The God of Small...
March 15, 2005
Philip Short's Pol Pot is a controversial book. The New York Times review and (even more strongly) the Washington Post's review both praise Short's writing and style (from the WP: "His text sparkles with shrewdly plausible inferences mortared into a...
March 10, 2005
Ghost Wars describes the over twenty year history of the US government's involvement in Afghanistan. There is nothing really earth-shattering here, just details of historical points where different decisions by the US would likely have derailed 9/11 (but hindsight is...
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March 06, 2005
I praised the writing of Frederick Busch in one of my first posts on this blog after reading The Children in the Woods, an excellent collection of short stories. I read one of his old (published in 1974) novels last...
February 28, 2005
Sunday's New York Times Magazine featured this excellent feature on Jonathan Safran Foer. I loved his Everything is Illuminated, and am eagerly awaiting Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. From this article it sounds like it should be a fascinating work...
February 21, 2005
If you read this blog for awhile, or you know me, you might know that I have a particular fondness for good short fiction - see here, here and here. I'm always intrigued when I read a new writer, and...
February 12, 2005
Halberstam's book (already discussed here and here) is a review of the political decisions that were made between about 1960 (when Kennedy takes office) and about 1965 (when the decisions were made to Americanize the war and increase troop strength...
December 28, 2004
I consider myself to be a big fan of David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest was amazing, even if it did take me months to get through it. And A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is a truly great...
November 15, 2004
When we started this blog that I was making a weekly habit of recommending particularly good novels (click on the "Books" archive if you want to read my thoughts on the likes of Hotel World, The Rotter's Club, and The...
October 03, 2004
Yesterday I did something I very rarely do. I put aside a novel I was half-way through and decided I wouldn't read any more of it. Given that, perhaps it is unfair to criticize it harshly. All sorts of books...
September 26, 2004
I just finished reading John Lamberton Harper’s American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy. I recommend it for those interested in Hamilton, but beyond that it sheds a good deal of light on foreign policy and...
September 25, 2004
Remember back when many of the country’s finest weeklies regularly included top-drawer short fiction? Neither do I, but at least The New Yorker still provides this valuable service. And as to their recent offerings, Joyce Carol Oates’ “Spider Boy” (in...
September 23, 2004
The New York Times bring us up to date on the latest activities of Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket and author of The Basic Eight)....
September 20, 2004
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies by James Bamford. (Amazon link: Pretext for War (2004)) Brief Review: Nothing anyone hasn’t seen before. Neo-cons push US into war, force intel community to go along....
September 17, 2004
For a year or two this Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket, in his musical moments he’s the accordianist for The Magnetic Fields) work was one of my favorite novels. My love of it may have faded a tiny...
September 09, 2004
Wow. Drew is nobody's idea of a screed-writer. She's been in the business of writing on Washington's decision makers and the decision-making process for decades, and while the quality of her work tends to be very high, it is also...
August 16, 2004
The Fourth R: Conflicts over Religion in America's Public Schools by Joan DelFattore, copyright 2004. Amazon Link Brief Review: Religious and secular parents, children, administrators and politicians have disagreed about the correct/right role of religion in public education for over...
August 15, 2004
A couple of months ago my friend Crystal wrote me that she saw this book and thought of me (as to what that says about me, you be the judge). It has one of the best titles ever (for those...
Phil Carter's comments on Max Boot's review of General Tommy Franks' new book are well worth reading. They contain a number of important insights about planning the war again Iraq (or the failure to plan it). Carter also rightly critiques...
August 14, 2004
I just finished Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. This novel has received a host of raves, and it won the 2001 National Book Award. While it's always hard to say which work is really the best of any year, I'm thinking...
August 12, 2004
"Dereliction of Duty: Lydon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam", by H.R. McMaster. Copyright 1997. Amazon Link Brief Review: President plays politics with foreign wars in order to further domestic agenda....
August 05, 2004
Law professor Eric Muller is examining Michelle Malkin's controversial new book defending racial profiling and the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II over on The Volokh Conspiracy. You can find some of the highlights here, here, here, here,...
August 03, 2004
Phil Carter notes some intriguing changes in the Army's professional reading lists. While there are some things on these lists that give me pause (why on Earth is the Clash of Civilizations required? is a Friedman book the most we...
July 18, 2004
My book recommendation for this weekend is Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. If you've never read Rushdie you really should give him a try. His use of language is stunning: the little constructions he makes up, the lush, vibrant...
July 13, 2004
OK, in a shameless attempt to get a little action in the comments section I’m going throw out a question. Who are your top 5 writers of short fiction? You can construe top 5 to be either the 5 “best”...
July 07, 2004
OK, since Baltar's a little interested I'll run down Allen's views of what he sees as the 4 parties in the College. These are important because while from a typical US perspective most are dominated by "conservatives" they have different...
July 06, 2004
I read John Allen's Conclave two weeks ago. It's an interesting look at the process of electing popes, the current state of the Catholic hierarchy, the "political parties" in the church, and the leading candidates to succeed John Paul II....
July 03, 2004
My book recommendation for this weekend is one of my favorite novels of the last few years, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club. It deals with the trials and tribulations of four guys growing up around Birmingham, England in the early...
June 21, 2004
I skimmed Henry Nau's At Home Abroad: Identity and Power in American Foreign Policy over the weekend. Nau is basically arguing that too often studies of foreign relations give a special place to the influence of material power without considering...
May 31, 2004
Yes, others have read and discussed this. I get to do it too. Short version: Bush looks decisive, Rumsfeld looks autocratic, Feith looks like an idiot, Cheney and Wolfowitz look fanatical, Rice looks ineffectual and Powell comes off looking like...
May 30, 2004
If you are not yet appalled by the Saudi government, and by how the American political system deals with it, you might want to read (or skim) Robert Baer’s Sleeping With the Devil. Because you really should be appalled by...
May 16, 2004
I believe that finding a writer who has a talent for saying ordinary things in extraordinary ways is one of the greatest little pleasures of life. With that in mind, I suggest the fiction of Frederick Busch as this week’s...
May 09, 2004
If I'm recommending a movie today, I should recommend a book too, especially since it's almost beach season. So let me point your attention to Hotel World by Ali Smith. Is it really beach reading? Sure. It is a slender...