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Books

Book reviews and criticism on fiction, history, philosophy, religion, and more.

Popular book reviews and analyses include The Handmaid’s Tale, Gravity’s Rainbow, and The Genealogy of Morals.

73 posts

Dan Geddes interview
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Satire in the Global Village

Published 4y ago -

Satire in the Global Village By Dan Geddes[1] From the talk, “Satire in the Global Village” given at the Institute of General Semantics’ symposium on “Language and Reality” on October 3, 2015 at the Princeton Club in New York. First published in Anek... More »

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Harold Bloom

Published 4y ago -

Harold Bloom was America’s best known literary critic for at least 30 years. Reading Bloom’s books were often a guilty pleasure for me. He wrote effusively in superlatives about his favorite writers, the writers of the “traditional” Wes... More »

Utopia for Realists
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Review: Utopia for Realists

Published 5y ago -

Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman (Translated by Elizabeth Manton) Review by Dan Geddes Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists) makes compelling arguments for the redistribution of the unprecedented wealth of the contemporary world. Bregman collects and prese... More »

Thomas Pynchon
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Thomas Pynchon

Published 6y ago -

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most influential and critically revered American novelists of his time. Pynchon’s verbal virtuosity, multi-dimensional erudition, and anarchic sense of humor have earned him the title of “bard of the counterculture.R... More »

The_Circle
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The Circle: A 1984 for Our Time

Published 10y ago -

  Dave Eggers 3 January 2014 Review by Dan Geddes The Circle, Dave Eggers’ novel named for a fictitious Google-like company that profits from its users’ data and destroys individual privacy, is a topical and compelling read. The story takes place in a... More »

uaardvark
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What’s Going On at UAardvark?

Published 10y ago -

By Lawrence S. Wittner Review by Dan Geddes What’s Going On at Uardvark? is a satirical campus novel, one where the university is utterly dominated by corporate interests. Companies outbid each other to have the campus buildings named after them. “... More »

amsterdam_history_most_liberal_city
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Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

Published 10y ago -

Review by Dan Geddes See also: The Island at the Center of the World The Dutch Republic The First Salute Russell Shorto’s Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City is such an enjoyable book in part because Shorto cherry-picks the most i... More »

Bleeding Edge
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Bleeding Edge

Published 11y ago -

Essay by Dan Geddes See also: The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, Inherent Vice, and Dys, an imaginary Pynchon novel Most Thomas Pynchon fans will not be disappointed by Bleeding Edge, his new novel set in New York in 2001. Some may be dis... More »

The Perfect Defective

Published 11y ago -

Clark Casey Review by Dan Geddes Clark Casey’s The Perfect Defective is a hilarious short novella, an enjoyable beach read if your sense of humor includes ribald parody of the LA private detective genre. Aside from the Spade or Marlowe associations, some... More »

Me_Talk_Pretty
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Me Talk Pretty One Day

Published 12y ago -

  Review by Timothy Hurley When I retired after thirty-five years of medical practice my friends said I had to have a plan. They said I’d be dead in a month if I had no plan. I didn’t work thirty-five years to die in a month. So I decided to take a hu... More »

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