Doubt the Experts

In some respects, this summer feels like winter. The coronavirus restricts social activity, and the high temperatures keep us indoors in a m...

I finally got around to finishing the book. After philosophy, Bouvard and Pécuchet become interested in religion. Bouvard, who is more or le...

I'm not finding this novel exceptionally exciting, though, to some extent, it is satisfying at least in the sense that French culture, i...

I'm in my usual summer lull, in which I don't read much, and have chosen this novel by Gustave Flaubert because, for literature, it ...

I finished reading Mary Trump's book and didn't find it enlightening at all. From reading it, you would never know that she is a Ph....

I've been reading Carl Zuckmayer's autobiography, A Part of Myself , which was published in 1966, to fill in some of the details lef...

This memoir, first published in Germany in 1949, covers the lives of Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her family while they lived in Vermont durin...

With the help of the coronavirus, I'm having an unusually dull summer. So far, Vermont, which has an elderly population compared to most...

As expected, I finished the book. Part Four includes the chapters "Borders and Property: The Construction of Equality," "Brah...

I am finding that the book is structurally ill-conceived and far too long for the abbreviated conclusions that Piketty is likely to reach in...

Part Two of the book consists of an exhaustive description of slave and colonial societies. There is so much material in this book – it coul...

The book includes a detailed description of the historical structure of society in several countries. The earliest widespread structure, cal...

For a number of reasons, I'm out of my winter reading mode and will probably proceed through this book, by Thomas Piketty, very slowly. ...

I had been hoping to start commenting on another book by now, but the one I was reading wasn't worth it. It was on algorithms and turned...

I'm glad to be finished reading about Charles Darwin, because he isn't the best subject for a biography. However, he fits the patter...

During his final years, Darwin seems to have scaled back on his work a little. He continued with plants, writing on insectivorous ones, and ...

Though Darwin's health remained uneven, he continued to write books. His next one was The Descent of Man , which was published in 1871. ...

When Alfred Russel Wallace got home, he and Darwin developed a cordial relationship but did not seem especially close. Wallace moved in with...

Origin of Species soon became widely discussed. One of the first major events in England occurred at the British Society for the Advancement...

This book starts where the other left off, in 1858, when Darwin was 49, and that year turned out to have an explosive effect on the remainde...