Walls by David Frye
★★★★☆ In Walls: a History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, David Frye has written an encompassing and enlightening review of walls through the centuries, ranging from 2000 B.C. to the present. A “Selected Timeline”...
Author: John Formy-Duval
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
★★★★☆ What is the cost of living? How do our choices affect us? What compromises must we make in order to have a fulfilling life? By what metrics do we measure the days of...
Spying on Whales by Nick Pyenson
★★★★☆ Is there anything more awe-inspiring than watching a whale, the largest creature on earth, gliding through the ocean and breaching, slapping its flukes onto the water? We travel and pay good money to...
Wolf on a String by Benjamin Black
★★★☆☆ Benjamin Black’s “historical fantasy…(shows that) real life at the court of Rudolf II was entirely phantasmagorical.” Wolf on a String is a brooding historical noir that imagines the sordid underbelly of Rudolf’s court...
Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright
★★☆☆☆ The promise of Robert Wright’s title is not fulfilled in this personal narrative of his journey toward enlightenment and a deeper understanding of Buddhism. The Appendix of Why Buddhism Is True finally reveals...
Milk! by Mark Kurlansky
★★★★☆ Mark Kurlansky writes that milk is a “10,000-year-old controversy. When you think about it, it was a pretty weird thing to begin with, the idea that we could replace mothers with secretions from...
Atlas of a Lost World by Craig Childs
★★★★☆ Half a lifetime ago my graduate minor was anthropology with a smattering of archaeology. It was so long ago that none of the giants whose works I read and studied are even mentioned...
Voices from the Rust Belt, edited by Anne Trubek
★★★☆☆ Walter Mondale said that “Reagan’s policies are turning our industrial Midwest into a rust bowl” during a 1984 campaign rally in Cleveland. The press picked up and transformed the statement into the phrase...
The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells
★★☆☆☆ The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders disappoints. The title and the cover, a picture of the Dublin University library, suggest a look at some of the great libraries of the world. Instead, we...
