Archive for The Book Bum - page 8

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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Goldberg, Michelle. The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015 (322pp.$26.95) Now that yoga is the province of slick promotions, self-indulgence, and the sweat-box mentality of exercise studios, it…

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  “More help with the sorrows of the digital age…” Holmes, Jamie. Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, Crown Publishers, New York, 2015 (322pp.$27) “It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense,” Chekhov wrote to a friend. “Only fools…

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Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015 (473pp.$30). These days the name Alexander Von Humboldt resists recognition. But in his time (the late 18th and early 19th centuries), he was a world celebrity, an acknowledged…

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Tackett, Timothy. The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution, The Belknap Press, Harvard University, Cambridge MA and London, 2015 (463pp.$35) The scramble by historians and to unscramble the “meaning” of terror in the French revolution commenced as soon as heads began to roll….

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Reich, Robert B. Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015 (279pp.$26.95) Though politicians seeking to cash in on the slogans and shibboleths surrounding immigration, abortion, and militant nationalism often obfuscate our country’s ills, the reality is otherwise. For…

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Didion, Joan. Blue Nights, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (188pp.$25) One of our finest, quintessentially American writers, Joan Didion, is the author of fiver novels and eight works of nonfiction. The nonfiction has been collected as “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”…

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Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt, New York, 2013 (352pp.$28) They are a heedlessly aggressive species, territorial without mercy, hierarchical without conscience and, like their evolutionary cousins the chimpanzees, willful murderers of their own kind. Though not endowed by evolution with…

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