The Hard Boiled Detectives
Mark Richardson — Edgar Allan Poe is generally regarded as the father of the detective fiction genre. In his classic stories, The Murders In the Rue Morgue, The Mystery [...]
Books
The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery
Bob Bates — One of the most provocative books I’ve read that deals with religion is Richard Elliot Friedman’s The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (1995). [...]
Winter Reading: Tolstoy and Mann
Mark Richardson — When I was seventeen years old, I set as a goal for myself the reading of all of the works of a certain group of authors. This group included all of [...]
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Bob Bates — Sociologist Matthew Desmond’s widely acclaimed book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), a study of the city of Milwaukee, pounds [...]
Lefty, Scooter, and Hankus Pankus: Three Baseball Legends
Mark Richardson — My late fall/early winter reading has recently focused on classic fiction, Tolstoy and Mann, but I have found time to squeeze in three baseball [...]
America’s Four Gods
Ron Berger — Cross-national studies indicate that Americans report one of the highest levels of belief in God in the world. A recent Gallup Poll conducted in May-June [...]
Those Neighbors
DeWitt Clinton — Most people I see I don’t know. I can sit down on a public bench and not say a word to the guy sitting next to me, as he’s busy scrolling or [...]
David’s Secret Demons
Jeff Berger — Recently I read Baruch Halpern’s biography about King David of ancient Israel/Judah called David’s Secret Demons: Messiah, Murderer, [...]
Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert Reich
Ron Berger — In his most recent book Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few (2015), Robert Reich aims to explain how “the increasing concentration of political [...]
Austerity is a Greek Tragedy
Jeff Berger — In his most recent book Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (Yale University Press, 2016), James K. [...]
When Our Worlds Cried: California’s Genocide
Tony Platt — Too many academic historians are reluctant to accept that the catastrophic experiences of California Indians during the 19th century meet United Nations [...]
Faith and Baseball
Mark Richardson — Every now and again one stumbles upon a book that addresses issues which have flitted through one’s mind throughout his/her life, but which [...]
Making Science Fiction Sentient
Charles Ogg — The editors of Wise Guys invited me to write an article on science fiction (sf) and an online magazine I am planning to start called Sentient Fiction. [...]
A Carefully Crafted Life
Mark Richardson — “Moe could speak twelve languages, but he couldn’t hit in any of them.” Such was the scouting report on Moe Berg, the subject [...]
Whittaker Chambers by Sam Tanenhaus
Mark Richardson — In the current political atmosphere, in which angry conservatives seem to be claiming that the way to “make America great again” is to [...]
Reflections on The Big Short
Ron Berger — The Academy Award nominated film The Big Short is an entertaining dramatization of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Most [...]
Who Would Alice Have Voted For?
Jeff Berger — I recently finished a biography called Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by historian Stacy A. [...]
Baseball and the Literati: Runyon, Lardner and Farrell
Mark Richardson — We are all aware of Ernest Hemingway’s expression of affection for Joe DiMaggio in The Old Man and the Sea, of Phillip [...]
For the Love of the Game
Ron Berger — I share Mark Richardson’s interest in nonfiction baseball books (see Wise Guys, February 17, 2016) and thought I’d take the opportunity to also share a [...]
