Ward Connerly is a crusader, but a crusader who has picked a battle that matters. A black man born in the south but raised in the west, Connerly is a unique figure in the fight for equal rights against racial preferences. Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race Preferences, part autobiography and part political memoir, is […]
Review | Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham
2013-05-26 · by ·
It took me a long time to begin to like Jon Meacham’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. As I finished it, however, I found myself a reluctant admirer, appreciative of Meacham’s style and of the biography, not to mention of the man. Meacham is the author of two previous books […]
Review | Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff
2013-05-16 · by ·
There was a moment when reading Mitchell Zuckoff‘s latest book, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II, that I crossed over from a mildly interested reader to a rabid page turner. I’m pretty sure it was in the first chapter, if not the […]
Author Feature | Mitchell Zuckoff
2013-04-30 · by ·
Two of the best and most interesting books I’ve read in the last year–Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time –are both tales of harrowing and dangerous rescues set during World War II. Both involve the rescue of survivors of crashed airplanes–from the one of the last unexplored jungles of the world and the other from […]
Review | The Price of Politics by Bob Woodward
2013-04-18 · by ·
AND NOW: something completely different than our typical posts of late on time travel, different worlds, and wizards. Politics. (And just like that we loose half our readers…or more). Just a short while ago, the US of A was in the throws of yet another manufactured crisis–the sequester! A long word with a very simple […]
Review | The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
2013-04-05 · by ·
In the author’s note to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee notes that “Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases.” It anticipates Mukherjee’s history, a look at cancer starting in the ages and proceeding forward to the modern day. It’s a 4,000 year history, and Mukherjee tells it well. The […]
Review | Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
2013-04-04 · by ·
David Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist, an early member of the Occupy Wall Stree movement. He’s so “out there” that even Yale decided not to renew his contract as an assistant professor in 2005. If he’s too liberal for Yale, then…well, you know. Probably too liberal for me, too, right? Or maybe not. If just […]
Review | Our Best Bites: Mormon Moms in the Kitchen by Sara Wells and Kate Jones
2013-03-14 · by ·
It’s Pi Day people. March 14th. You know, mathematics, circumference, Pi=3.14. Pi Day is meant to be a day where we all celebrate mathematics. I’ve never found much of a reason to celebrate math, but if it means pie, they hey, I’m all in. One of my favorite desserts is a cheesecake, and although it’s […]
Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
2013-02-12 · by ·
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Might I suggest a book on the man who may have been our greatest president? It might be said of Abraham Lincoln, born on this day in 1809, that if he had not existed, we would have needed to invent him. With very rare exception, no person in American political history […]
Review | Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff
2013-01-23 · by ·
In the closing months of World War II, twenty-four serviceman and WACs climbed aboard a military transport plane for a day of sightseeing over a recently discovered “hidden valley” deep in the interior of Dutch New Guinea. Surrounded by high, jungle covered mountains and far from civilization, the valley was home to natives undiscovered by […]
