Doubt the Experts

It looks as if I've almost completely recovered from the Lyme disease. I don't want to get into the habit of boring readers with acc...

As I've mentioned before, the time lag between the announcement of new scientific findings and their assimilation by the public is often...

We were hit by the heatwave that affected much of the country, and the temperature got up to ninety-two here. It's quite cool again, whi...

When I read book reviews in The New York Times many years ago, I was often impressed by those written by Anatole Broyard. He didn't pub...

With no good reading materials on hand, a guest in the house, technical telescope issues to solve, tomato plants to attend to and a few hot ...

These are the other two short stories by Simone de Beauvoir in the volume I'm reading. "The Monologue" is not to my taste, bec...

I've just read this short story by Simone de Beauvoir. It features a sixtyish couple, André and his wife, their son, Phillipe, Phillipe...

I'm having a disorienting spring and hope to settle into something that resembles a familiar routine soon. First, I became a chauffeur, ...

The chapter on America evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. and the challenges it faces. While presenting a perspective that i...

As I said, I'm not finding this to be the most exciting reading. After Indonesia there is a chapter on Germany, which focuses on the Wor...

This book is not as exotic as Collapse , which isn't necessarily a weakness, though reading it feels more like dutifully informing onese...

I'm reading this latest book from Jared Diamond. As in Collapse , he includes several case studies, but this time the main topic is mode...

The book I was reading, Mikhail Bulgakov: A Critical Biography , by Lesley Milne, was a disappointment. It consists mainly of summaries of h...

I read a few more of the essays in Extremes  but have decided not to comment extensively on them. There is an excellent summary of the globa...

I've been reading essays in a new collection called  Extremes  and will discuss some of them individually. I found "Extreme Politic...

I may already be running out of books to read in the biography/autobiography/memoir category and am having difficulty finding suitable ones....

This new book by Edward O. Wilson is extremely short, which is a plus, but I didn't find it particularly satisfying. I had a similar rea...

After being engrossed with Rousseau for so long, I was having a hard time finding something new to read. At this stage in my life, I get bor...

The epilogue consists of a summary of Rousseau's contributions and a description of the influence of his work over time. The material wa...

The remainder of the book, apart from the epilogue, covers the period from 1765 to 1778, and the last chapter was pieced together from Crans...