I didn’t do a lot of reviews this past year. Fifty three in all. It was an election year and I write mostly about politics, and I have a backlog going into 2025. Also, if I think something is rubbish, I’m very unlikely to review it. And there was a fair old bit of rubbish that came out last year.
by Isaac Peterson 193 pages, publication date December 8, 2023. Isaac Peterson was lucky in that his verbal and intellectual abilities survived a major stroke intact. The rest of us are lucky in that Isaac always had superior verbal and intellectual skills, and was more than willing to share with us what it means to …
A Year in review: a review of 2023 2023 was another great year for television. Among other great shows we watched (and I reviewed) this year were Gen V (outrageous spin-off of The Boys), One Piece (excellent live-action version of a rather dumb anime), a new BBC remake of War of the Worlds, an engaging …
They Called Us Enemy by George Takei Co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott and illustrated by Harmony Becker. Top Shelf Productions 2019, 204 pages I first learned of the Canadian internment of Japanese-descended people in British Columbia—some 90% of the residents in that province—when I was 12 years old. My father told me of …
Disloyal: Cohen Pines Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (c) 2020 Michael Cohen, Skyhorse Publishing Michael Cohen is a vicious dirtbag who should never be allowed to walk free again. The first part of that sentence is factual, backed by Cohen himself. The second part is just …
Too Much and Never Enough : How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man Mary L. Trump 2020, Simon and Schuster There have been so many tell-all books about this leaking, sinking ship of a president that the market is pretty much saturated. By the time it was John Bolton’s turn to make a …
Polemical Judo David Brin November 20th 2019 This is the same David Brin who is widely known as a futurist and award-winning science fiction author. He’s always been an outspoken voice for accountability from authority, strong reliance by society on the knowledge to be gained from science, openness of knowledge and data, and deprecation of …
Against the Fall of Night: a review of American Carnage. Copyright © 2019 by Tim Alberta HarperCollins “[Sarah Palin] was the early embodiment of some of the problems that would plague the party; mediocrity, anger, resentment, populism, proudly anti-intellectual, and increasingly bitter. And she was a rock star for it.” – Peter Wehner, veteran of …
Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America Nancy MacLean Copyright 2107, Penguin Books. The libertarian biographer Charles K. Rowley once said of James McGill Buchanan that he was “perhaps the most hated and feared enemy of left-leaning economists throughout the world.” Not just economists. Buchanan is considered the …
Fear: Trump in the White House Bob Woodward Simon & Schuster September 2018 Yes, I know the title of the book is Fear, and I should have regarded that as fair warning. But FFS, I thought I would at least get through the Prologue without being reduced to mindless, numbing, existential terror! In a well-reported …