Whither the United States?: A Review of “Tailspin” by Steven Brill
Charles Cottle — In the past year and a half numerous articles have been written about how the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States has highlighted the [...]
Books
The Soul of Black Folk: A Tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois
Jeff Berger — In this year that the Republican Party is hell-bent on trying to prevent schools from teaching about the history of racism in this country, I am [...]
Nero Wolfe: Bluster, Beer, and Brilliance
Mark Richardson — Classic detective fiction has occupied a lot of my time during this year of pandemic. I have always loved good detective fiction, and I have taken [...]
The Deficit Myth
Ron Berger — One of the influential books I read while studying sociology in graduate school was Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn [...]
The Faithless? The Untold Story of the Electoral College
Dave Gillespie — Do you think of yourself as something of a political junkie? Are you interested in, or concerned about, problems like partisan polarization and the [...]
The California Housing Crisis
Jeff Berger — Conor Dougherty’s new book, Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America, is an important contribution to understanding the housing crisis in the [...]
Re-Reading Fitzgerald
Mark Richardson — I was 16 years old when I first became aware of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I was a junior in high school when one of the most important [...]
Big Brother IS Watching You: Edward Snowden and Government Surveillance
Bob Bates — In 2013, the US government charged Edward Snowden with violating the Espionage Act for releasing National Security Agency (NSA) information, specifically [...]
Books Recently Read – Fall 2018 to Fall 2019
Charles Cottle —Below are a few short description of books I have read recently. I have grouped them into fiction and non-fiction categories. This past year I joined a [...]
In the Midst of the Sixth Extinction
Bob Bates — In May 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an international panel of more than 450 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
