It’s been ten years since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I now realize that my seventeen-year-old self was incapable of internalizing even a fraction of the tragedy and grace contained in this overwhelming story. A decade on, what was once fodder for my sophomoric literary intellect has recast itself as a narrative […]
“Not one single history book is objective,” Jason Ripper writes in the final chapter of American Stories, Vol. II. “Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias” (260). I heartily agree. This admission of bias is in especially good taste given Ripper’s […]
2022 Update: I enjoyed this book much more the second time around compared to my first reading. It’s smarter, more coherent, and more interesting than I remember. I think I understood it better, both because I’m more familiar with some of the ideas Watts was working with, and also because I’m less allergic to the […]
Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is a radical book penned with a lot of passion and the best of intentions. This treatise on alternative economics serves up some very worthy ideas that are compromised by a handful of the author’s less rigorous tendencies and intellectually insupportable positions. As a whole, the book had a decidedly divisive effect […]
This is the kind of book I long to be intelligent enough to fully comprehend, although to purport having done so would be to ignore Blindsight‘s unnerving central message. Blindsight is an incredibly dark, thought-provoking tale that is equal parts science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller. Relying on a one-two punch that alternates between a heady […]
After a disappointing standoff with The Gunslinger, two of my closest friends encouraged me to give Stephen King another shot before writing him off entirely. One of them, a longtime fan, suggested that On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft would be a better fit for me. She was right. On Writing is a quick, […]
I recently listened to a recording of Stephen King speaking and reading an excerpt from his latest book for a live audience, and was charmed by his rough candor and obvious affection for his doting readership. He seemed like a guy who’d be great to get a beer with (or seven). I’ve never done more […]
We are living through the most overpopulated, wasteful, and polluted moment in human history. In response to the increasing data and alarm regarding the problem of climate change, many people have begun searching for philosophical and practical frameworks to illuminate how we can reduce our participation in environmental destruction and start healing Earth’s depleted ecosystems. Moral […]
Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is a bewitching but almost unbearably bloated novel. Deftly mimicking the oblique style of Jane Austen, Clarke resurrects the concerns, mannerisms and values of early-19th century England. Into this historical milieu she chucks a fabricated history of “English magic,” a longstanding but recently stagnant tradition waiting to be […]
James Barrat’s Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era is a disturbing, plangent response to the rosy-minded, “rapture of the nerds” mentality that has recently swept across the futurist landscape. Toeing the line between rational prudence and alarmist hand-wringing, Barrat makes the case not only that advanced artificial intelligence is […]