I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a ( Read more... )

Today marks the eighty-second commemoration of the Battle of Midway, which has provided material for lots of authors, whether as participants, reporters, or serious scholars.  We've called attention to a number of those books over the years: Midway, The Midway Campaign, The Unknown Battle of Midway, Shattered Sword, No Right to Win, and Never Call ( Read more... )

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I read this book some time ago, but didn't produce the most comprehensive review:


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Alexandra Robbins has made a career out of exploring the lives of the young and ambitious, whether it's the overscheduled kids of the upscale suburbs or the social climbing of the southern sororities, and she continues her work in Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men.  The "becoming" leaves the "boys" at different ( Read more... )

I had Roger Koppl's Expert Failure along for reading the evening the DeKalb Municipal Band played a tune inspired by the Omaha Nation dividing itself into two sub-tribes, one responsible for the defense of the nation, the other with the spiritual health of the people.  (There might have been something similar among the Tribes of Israel, but I'm not ( Read more... )

You get Geoffrey Hodgson's Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, which he intends as a reproach to his comrades among the Anointed, and which Book Review No. 7 notes, works well as a defense of Scottish Enlightenment concepts that at one time might have been a logic manual for pushing that Social Progress.  That pivot to the Scottish Enlightenment ( Read more... )

Book 4: Prisoners of Geography: Ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics by Tim Marshall - 291 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:All leaders are constrained by geography. Their choices are limited by mountains, rivers, seas and concrete. Yes, to understand world events you need to understand people, ideas ( Read more... )

Book 42: Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth by Adam Frank - 250 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:Light of the Stars tells a radically new story about what we are: one world in a universe awash in planets. Building on his widely discussed scientific papers and The New York Times op-eds, astrophysicist Adam Frank ( Read more... )

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