Living on the Edge of the World: Viking Settlement in the North Atlantic
Jeff Berger — Previously I published an article in Wise Guys entitled “Celebrating the Viking Past” that focused on the way Europeans and North Americans have [...]
Books
The Persistence of White Power Movements in America
Bob Bates — The topic of Kathleen Belew’s recent book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), [...]
The Politics of Identity: Insights from Francis Fukuyama
Ron Berger — In his slim but useful book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), Francis Fukuyama offers [...]
1968: The Year That Changed U.S. Politics, and Our Lives
Ron Berger — For people of my generation, the baby boomers, Lawrence O’Donnell’s Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics [...]
Baseball and Murder Mysteries
Mark Richardson — Mickey Rawlings is a baseball player. He’s also a sleuth. He does not solve murders because he has a yen to be a detective. Rather, he has [...]
Let’s All Move to Norway
Jeff Berger — Last January Donald Trump tweeted that immigrants to America should not be allowed to come from “shithole countries” like Haiti and nations in [...]
God: A Human History, by Reza Aslan
DeWitt Clinton — Every year—for years, decades, and perhaps centuries—scholars, theologians, and lay leaders have been defining, then redefining, then [...]
Daniel Ellsberg’s Doomsday Papers
Bob Bates — Daniel Ellsberg is universally known as the “man behind the Pentagon Papers.” However, with the publication of his new book, The Doomsday [...]
Why Do We Like Crime Fiction So Much?
Charles Cottle — Take a look at the New York Times best seller list any given week and you will see that about a third of the books listed are crime mysteries. [...]
Books Recently Read: A Summer of Fiction
Charles Cottle — Over the summer I read a number of popular books from various best seller lists. Here are my short reviews of ten of those. As you can see, I [...]
Innocence Lost: From Babes to Bloodshed
Bob Bates — In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (2013), Paul Bloom, psychology professor at Yale University, reports on the work he has conducted [...]
Baseball’s Ol’ Perfessor
Mark Richardson — Marty Appel, author of Munson, the acclaimed biography of former New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, has done it again. This top-notch profiler [...]
Uncle Ho: A Man of Peace
Jeff Berger — On November 11, 1944, a U.S. reconnaissance plane piloted by Lieutenant Rudolph Shaw encountered engine trouble while flying over the rough mountainous [...]
Inequality of Disclosure: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Tony Platt — In 2010, Rebecca Skloot was a little known science journalist on the faculty at the University of Memphis when her first book The Immortal Life of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
