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Microreview: Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty may be the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s the rare book where you think about the subject and have a hard time believing you are so involved with it.

On the surface, Red Plenty is, for lack of a better term, a literary history of […]

Book Review: Comic Books and the Cold War, 1946-1962, edited by Chris and Rafiel York

As David Hadju documents in his excellent examination of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s, The Ten-Cent Plague, adults saw the genre as contributing to juvenile delinquency and even subverting American values. This uproar, which included U.S. Senate hearings, led to the creation of the Comic Codes Authority in 1954. Yet even before the […]

Book Review: The Investigation by Phillipe Claudel

Kafkaesque. It’s one of a handful of literary terms that is really overworked. But I challenge anyone to read Phillipe Claudel’s The Investigation without that word coming to mind. Ultimately, though, Claudel adds a surrealistic resolution that may baffle readers.

Claudel’s book tells of the Investigator, sent to an unnamed city to investigate a series […]

Book Review: With Liberty and Justice for Some by Glenn Greenwald

Although many consider it little more than a holiday with fireworks, July 4 is meant to celebrate the final approval of the Declaration of Independence and its precepts. One of its key elements is epitomized in the phrase “that all men are created equal.” Granted, there was an inherent contradiction with the existence of slavery […]

Book Review: The Martians Have Landed!: A History of Media-Driven Panics and Hoaxes by Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford

It’s an aphorism that is phrased various ways. Yet the truth general truth of “It’s not the idea, it’s the execution” holds true in almost any endeavor. Books are no exception.

Sociologist Robert Bartholomew and Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, have an intriguing concept in exploring the media’s spread of hoaxes and […]