The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016. $28.95) At a recent small college basketball game I was in the stands with perhaps twenty or thirty other fans, most, unlike me, parents of…
Perspectives: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (2010) We must accept the premise, so important to David Shields, that our society and culture now is “unbearably manufactured”, riddled with spectacle, innuendo, falsehood, celebrity, misinformation and data smog….
American Demagogue: The Why and How of Donald J. Trump Books discussed in this essay: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, (W.W. Norton and Company, New York) (1995) Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the…
American Demagogue: The Why and How of Donald J. Trump Books discussed in this essay: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, (W.W. Norton and Company, New York) (1995) Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the…
American Demagogue: The Why and How of Donald J. Trump Books discussed in this essay: The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch, (W.W. Norton and Company, New York) (1995) Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the…
Second Look Books: Hole in the Sky by William Kittrege (Alfred A. Knopf, $20) Review first published Sunday, August 30, 1992. It seems impossible, but there is a place in America that is so empty, so terrifyingly beautiful, that one, on seeing it for the…
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016 (645pp. illus., $30). At the height of its splendor in the era A.D. 650-800, Baghdad was a magnificent city, its parks, gardens, schools, hospitals, charitable foundations, mosques and bathhouses “lavishly…
Worster, Donald. Shrinking the Earth: The Rise and Decline of American Abundance, Oxford University Press, New York, 2016 (265pp.$27.95). Kansas has reason to be proud of Donald Worster, one of America’s foremost environmental historians. As a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas for more…
Michael Herr died last June 23, 2016, a sad day. Herr’s book “Dispatches” was the only true news from the war I remember. I was subject to the draft during the War, fought not in Vietnam but in the streets of the United States, and…
Sorokin, Vladimir (trans. Jamey Gambrell). The Blizzard, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2016 (181pp. $23) Bouts of spastic lust, dramatic descents into despondence followed by petulant ascents towards mania, simple bad humor, and a frequent taste for intoxicants like homemade vodka (and even rubbing…