Tag Archives: book review
Van Gogh The Life – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 9th May 2024In 2011 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith published a biography of the Dutch artist in cooperation with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The volume at close to 1000 pages is an almost minute by minute account of the tortured life of one of art’s most acclaimed figures. The sequence of disasters that constitute…
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Churchill: Walking with Destiny – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 11th July 2023Author Andrew Roberts has the industry of a worker bee mixed with the allure of a rare butterfly. He turns out historical biographies like lava from an active volcano. His one volume biography of Churchill, a very big one volume comprising 1152 pages, was published in 2018 and is the definitive account of the great…
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When Race Trumps Merit – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 15th May 2023Heather Mac Donald’s latest book is subtitled: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. It is such a tale of horrors that a number of alternate subtitles come to mind. Animal Farm Redux, How I Came to Love Big Brother, A Litany of Lunacy, 40 Years Before the Mast, Gone…
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The Price of Time – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th January 2023Edward Chancellor’s book , subtitled The Real Story of interest, starts with Hammurabi and continues to the present. He shows that interest is older than money and that the compulsion of governments to manipulate it is equally ancient. Interest has been seen as immoral by many religions, but has persisted because commerce is impossible without…
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Unsettled – Book review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 9th July 2022Steven E Koonin has written a book Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters. The volume is not very long consisting of mostly data (yes data!) and endnotes. It is a sober analysis of a subject that has been a field of landmines maiming the facts that underpin an…
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On First Looking Into James’s Lady
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 12th May 2022This is not an imaging result or any sort of diagnostic report. Rather it’s an account of an American novel more than 140 years old – Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. Having reached an age approaching that of an Old Testament prophet I realized that I had never read a word of one of…
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The Last King of America – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th March 2022Biographer Andrew Roberts recently published The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. The book is a detailed biography of the monarch who lost America. It’s so detailed that it likely contains more than some readers will care know about the King. Roberts had complete and unprecedented access to the royal archives…
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What Really Happened in Wuhan – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th January 2022Australian journalist Sharri Markson has written a book that seeks to find the source of the corona virus that has afflicted the world for more than two years. The subject has been so politicized from the very start such that any attempt to define its source will trouble many readers. Never has a medical and…
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Rationality – Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 25th October 2021Rationality is Steven Pinker’s latest book. It’s also one that will leave the reader nonplussed or just thinking “is this all there is”? It contains a relatively brief but accurate introduction to elementary logic and statistics. Bayesian analysis is explained successfully; but I suspect that explanation will be fully grasped only by those who already…
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Apropos of Nothing – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 18th June 2020Woody Allen’s autobiography caught my attention because of its title. Any book with “Nothing” in its title demands my notice. Allen and I grew up in neighboring parts of Brooklyn at the same time. He went to Midwood High School, I to James Madison – the latter less than 2 miles south of Midwood. Both…
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