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Category Archives: Reviews of Books

Barack Obama’s Audacity of Hope.

24-Oct-08

Kangar Let me start this review by stating that The Audacity of Hope is not a great book. I spend a great deal of time reading old books, and I am always looking, in modern books, for the quality and depth of thought I find in the old ones. It would be delightful to find the […]

Karen Armstrong’s History of God.

23-Oct-08

http://vintagegoodness.com/vintage-goodness-on-etsy/ When someone writes a four-hundred page summary of the monotheistic West’s ideas about God, there are a few things a reviewer can’t say. You can’t say that the author left things out; of course, that’s the nature of the project. You can’t say that the treatment of certain things was cursory; of course it will […]

Hillary Clinton’s Living History

17-Oct-08

       The plan which I conceived, of reading the books ascribed to the major remaining presidential candidates (John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Rodham Clinton), may easily be considered foolish.  It is not at all clear that anyone with any intellectual self-respect should read books like this.  They seem to sell well enough (Clinton and […]

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

12-Oct-08

       Readers who seek some profound insight into the nature of Afghanistan will probably be disappointed by reading The Kite Runner, a modern novel by Khaled Hosseini.  But the book is a very useful document for exploring the values of the liberal upper class, which one presumes is in large part an American/West-European phenomenon, although […]