Underbelly

The good folks at The Browser  favor me with a link to a Wall Street Journal   clip to the new Levitt/Dubner "Freako" book.  I ...

It struck me the other day that Harvard University Press appears to have been caught off guard by the runaway success of Thomas Piketty...

There are  no arbitrage opportunities, but here is an arbitrage opportunity:  Rick Perlstein's Nixonland is available on Amazon Kindle...

Two lovely posts this morning with the common theme of reading.  One, by Ian Crouch about remembering , or more particularly about forgetti...

One of the grandkids is discovering our common past.  He's saying it is a pity he wasn't in Paris in 1968, so as to have a part in ...

I seem to have gone through some kind of existentialist phase around 1976.  Here's an item from the card file: In the long run...wh...

Larry tells you most of what you need to know about the new world of publishing.  Great stuff; and note that he knew it last year.

Still reading the massive McCullough biography of Harry Truman.  Not the least of its merits is the leisurely and richly-textured account o...

I'm still trudging through Robert A. Caro's biography of Robert Moses and I'm willing to sign on to the view that it is a monum...

Scanning the literary horizon for the "hatchet job of the year," Stephen Moss has pre-awarded the prize to  Zo ë Heller for he...

It's time to name the best books of the year so naturally, serious people are asking, what will Buce name as the best books of the year...

Mr.and Mrs. Buce have been idling away their evenings with a viewing of a multipart German video version of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks ...

Robert Gottlieb, reviewing John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists: I’m grateful to him for resuscitating Florence Barclay, who, a...

My friend Toni is author of a book called How to Be Sick , aka "A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers...

Man, I am a sucker for booklists--my own, or anyone else's.  Maybe the digital substitute for browsing in bookstores.  I'm a paid-u...

Simon Johnson excoriates Jamie Dimon for hanging onto his seat on the board of the Federal Reserve of New York.  No dissent from me on tha...

As they got ready to publish Why Nations Fail , I suspect that Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson saw themselves as shooting at the bi...

Late in life when he was already well-known (if not always well  loved), Ed Banfield offered a credo : A political system is an accident. ...

I wouldn't say that Frank Knight's Economic Organization is his most important  work, or his most interesting.  Those accolades wou...

The Holy Roman Empire, reasoned the great Pufendorf, fits in none of the Aristotelean categories: it is neither monarchy, nor aristocracy, n...