I confess: I find it difficult to respect short novels. It has to do with expectations, I’m sure, as I love short stories. When I…
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is a clearheaded and rational examination of our minds’ ability to make rapid determinations based on small…
This is a sequel to Vinge’s *[The Peace War]([canonical-url:2005/11/16/im-still-fan])*, and although I enjoyed it much more than *The Peace War* I credit some of that…
Eliott Hester strikes me as the sort of guy who has dumbed himself down for so long that he doesn’t even realize it. He clearly…
To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the five best novels ever written, and I’m not sure what the other four were. I just finished…
See? I read fiction sometimes, too. I mean novels, of course. I can find plenty of fiction in the newspaper. Haw haw haw. Matches is a semiautobiographical…
Reading books that only make points I already agreed with is tedious. So yeah, yeah, Bush lied, people died, whatever. Show me something new already.…
There is a problem with writers who learned to craft the language for a television audience. The writing sometimes reads as a surface gloss. Stossel’s…
It’s probably a piece of trivia I should have remembered from Junior High, but I learned something I’d often wondered about from *Assassination Vacation*. An overused cliché from action movies and TV shows (and even novels) is the would-be killer bullet stopped by some object in the would-be victim’s vest or coat pocket. I’d wondered whether there was ever a documented case of a pocketwatch or cigarette case saving its carrier’s life.
Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, Jimmy Carter I admire Jimmy Carter. For all the criticism he’s gotten for being «America’s least effective president» I…