Category: Books

A lovely novel well-crafted.

Wow. This biographical series about LBJ has been on my to-read list for a long time. I’m glad I finally got around to starting it. Highly recommended!

I enjoyed the movie, but the book is better!

An overview of Paine’s life and work with a focus on his most important book. Hitchens sure loved to drop historical names and references as he showed off his book-larnin’, but he did it so well you can only nod in appreciation.

Gothic horror set in late 18th-century Revolutionary America. The language is baroque and the plot contrivances are unbelievable. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

There are a number of Tesla biographies now available. I suspect I may have picked the wrong one. Much of it is serviceable and the bare facts of Tesla’s life and times, presented copiously and in rigid chronological order, are interesting enough to make up for a plodding style. There are, however, definite flaws. For some reason the author chose to highlight a platonic romance between Tesla and a married friend. The details are totally uninteresting and its dramatizations are painful to read. It is as if an editorial mistake had strewn random pages of a lukewarm romance novel into a Tesla biography. Every bit of it could have been left out and the result would have been an unmitigated improvement.

There are other problems. The author is a ‘psycho-historian’ and uses Freudian psychology and handwriting analysis to speculate on the motives of various subjects. I was not convinced. And the final chapters get well into conspiracy-theory territory in their speculations on what may have been done with Tesla’s work on “death rays” among other things.

Tesla is certainly worth reading about, but if you do I’d recommend passing on this one.

A fun, meta-textual novel that explores the nature of story in a pretty engaging way. Anyway, it has kept me thinking for a while now.

Absolutely amazing book, totally blew my mind. Highly recommended.

The British Monarchy gets the Hitchens Treatment.

Nobody skewers the rubes like Mencken. Scopes himself described the trial as Mencken’s show.