Books

OK, so I have been MIA again. I have just returned from a vacation with my wife to Mexico. It was my first visit to the country, and hopefully it won’t be my last. It was eight days of pure relaxation on the Mayan Riviera. […]

Many of our presidents were well-known bibliophiles. Rutherford Hayes enjoyed Emerson. Calvin Coolidge translated Dante’s Inferno from the original Italian. Woodrow Wilson is the only president to have a PhD. And John F. Kennedy is the only Pulitzer Prize winner among presidential authors.These and other […]

The National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced, and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation has won the nonfiction category. This sounds like an interesting book. Here is a report on the rest of the winners from the Boston Globe. I don’t know much about the […]

I found a new book I want to put on my list to read (which is getting too big these days). It’s called The New New Journalism, and includes interviews with the best writers practicing long-form journalism today. I still have dreams of completing such […]

There is another book award coming soon. It’s called the Quills, and it seems to be an effort to bring books and authors to a marketing level a little more on par with film and the Oscars (the award ceremony will be broadcast on NBC […]

Here is the book that relates to an earlier post I made regarding intellectual life. Jonathan Rose’s recent article was excerpted from his own book titled The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Herre is how Amazon describes the book. “Which books did the […]

This looks like an interesting book. It’s written by Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine. By the way, he will be a guest tonight on the Charlie Rose show. Here is what the publisher has to say about the book. “Since when did believing in […]

I got a new book for Christmas from my in-laws (thanks again if you are reading this). It’s called Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. It’s written by Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, –another book I highly […]

It’s been one hundred years since Albert Einstein’s miraculous year of 1905. During that year, Einstein, “a young patent clerk, found the way forward. In five remarkable papers, he showed that atoms are real (it was still controversial at the time), presented his special theory […]