I’m going to give this a run: A post every week or so on what I’m reading , have recently read, or have poked through enough to get a decent sense of. The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers — and the Coming Cashless Society, by David Wolman This is quite a romp, half […]
Continue reading →Elmore Leonard likes to start scenes right in the middle of the scene, as he does, more or less, in the scene above from Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight,” adapted from Leonard’s novel of the same title. At too many Daves, David Quigg considers the virtue of starting an entire book in its middle: I turned […]
Continue reading →In 1864, in a radically risky move crucial to winning the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman led his army of some 80,000 men to Atlanta, burned it to the ground, and then marched to the coast of South Carolina, destroying almost all in his path. It was a wild, improbable gambit: He meant to and did […]
Continue reading →One of the many pleasures of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, which follow through 20.5 volumes the Napoleonic-era adventures of British Royal Navy Caption Jack Aubrey and his surgeon/spy/naturalist Stephen Maturin, are the closely observed and imagined encounters with wildlife. O’Brian, being the masterful novelist he is, never just shows us the wildlife; we see that […]
Continue reading →In winter I sometimes warm up by reading books with real cold. For a few years years I shuttled between Rick Bass’s Winter, about his first winter in Montana in the 1980s, and R.M. Patterson’s magnificent, shivering Dangerous River, of his days trapping the Yukon in the 1920s. Last week, partly to commemorate the centenary of […]
Continue reading →To start the new year, Andy Revkin, over at Dot Earth at the New York Times, wondered what traits we humans might be able to develop so that we “fall forward rather than down” as we try to deal with resource limits: The things we don’t know are easily as important as those we do. In such […]
Continue reading →I’m enjoying reviewing my Kindle reading highlights with the “Daily Review” feature, which lets you flick through highlights and notes you’ve made in Kindle books. Amid the LeCarre and Malcolm and Updike and Patti Smith and a way-too-big pile of books on genetics, I find this from Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy: We will see that […]
Continue reading →The wonderful site Longreads is collecting “5 Favorite Longreads” from a variety of writers, editors, and other folks. They were kind enough to ask me for mine. They appear at Longreads — and for faithful readers here, below as well. Do check out the other lists at Longreads as well. __ Truly we live, as Steve […]
Continue reading →Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 30 years ago, on seeing Hemingway 32 years earlier in Paris: For a fraction of a second, as always seemed to be the case, I found myself divided between my two competing roles. I didn’t know whether to ask him for an interview or cross the avenue to express my unqualified admiration […]
Continue reading →If you’re looking for good reading, you can find plenty — including some stellar science pieces — in Conor Friedersdorf’s post of Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism at the Atlantic. Here is my short list taken from his long one. Italicized comments are mine. Last Days Of The Comanches by S.C. Gwynne | Texas Monthly […]
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