Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 13

Taylor, Frederick. The Downfall of Money: Germany’s Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class, Bloomsbury Press, New York, 2013 (416pp. $30) The story of Germany’s hyperinflation begins in the late summer of 1914 when her young men marched off to glorious war accompanied by…

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The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, translated and collected by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Andrea Dezso, Princeton University Press, Princeton/Oxford, 2015 (519pp.$35) Romanticism, as a European aesthetic, rose at the end of the 18th century in direct…

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Labor, Earle. Jack London: An American Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013 (461pp. $30) At the height of his fame in the early 1900’s, Jack London was earning ten thousand dollars a month from a variety of sources including royalties on his novels…

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Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Jerusalem: The Biography, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (650pp.$35) Hughes, Robert. Rome: A Cultural, Visual, Personal History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York (498pp.$35) On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab in A.D. 70, the armies of the Roman Emperor Vespasian,…

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Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming and Individual in an Age of Distraction, Farrar Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015 (305pp.$26)   “distracted from distraction by distraction…” “Burnt Norton” T.S. Eliot   Distraction and worry are the default modes of human…

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Schulman, David. Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. Grand Central Publishing, Boston and New York, 2014 (424pp.$30) Driving into Wichita on old Highway 54 during the early 1960s, the visitor would encounter a large billboard with lettering…

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Here is a book about automation and its disabling of human ability.  Think “auto correct” and “auto pilot”.  Zombies of the digital world take note. Carr, Nicholas. The Glass Cage, W.W. Norton Co., New York, 2014 (261pp.$26.95) On May 31, 2009 an Air France Airbus…

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Billy Collins. Horoscopes for the Dead, Random House, New York, 2011 (106pp. $24) It is hard to disagree with the New York Times that Billy Collins is “America’s most popular poet.” Having risen almost from thin air, he placed several books with university presses in…

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Illies, Florian. 1913: The Year Before the Storm. Melville House, Brooklyn/London, (268pp. $25.95) Overcoming the curse of Romanticism in the effort to become modern can be dangerous to one’s health. Just ask Franz Kafka, whose psychosexual and intestinal battles are the stuff of legend; or,…

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Head, Simon. Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans, Basic Books (Perseus Books Group), New York, 2013 (230pp., $26.99)   Eighty years ago the English economist John Maynard Keynes authored a brief essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, in which he took a…

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