Blogroll

Book Review: Hunger: An Unnatural History (2005)

Somehow, somewhere America’s version of giving thanks became stuffing ourselves with food and then collapsing into an easy chair to watch football. Sharman Apt Russell’s Hunger: An Unnatural History provides an excellent counterpoint to that mindset. Before you start backing away, this isn’t book about famine in the third world (although that is unquestionably part […]

Book Review: Galileo’s Children (2005)

One of the things that attracted me to science fiction is its ability to create a different reality and use it as a prism through which to examine ourselves and society. That is part of what motivates Galileo’s Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition, an anthology of previously published short stories

The 13-story collection, issued […]

Book Review: The Da Vinci Fraud (2005)

Despite my antipathy of organized religion, I have always been fascinated by and read several works on New Testament research and scholarship. Robert Price’s The Da Vinci Fraud uses the opportunity presented by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as a framework to try to engage a wider audience in a discussion of the origins […]

Book Review: Radicals in Robes (2005)

I received Cass R. Sunstein’s Radicals in Robes after Harriett Miers was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court. I completed it less than 48 hours before “Miers asked Bush” to withdraw her nomination after having been skewered by the right wing of Bush’s base. Though Sunstein wasn’t writing specifically about Miers or the nomination process, […]

Book Review: Faith at War (2005)

Anyone who holds out hope about the near term in Iraq or the future of America’s relations with the Islamic world in general will find Faith at War depressing.

The book details the travels of Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov to a dozen countries with large Muslim populations in the three years after […]