Helpful votes received on reviews:
89% (55,174 of 62,135)
Location: Chicago, IL USA
In My Own Words:
While I appreciate the compliment of being asked to review books, I would prefer not to receive any solicitations. I always have multiple reading projects underway and really do not have the leisure to take on random books. I'm also trying to write a couple of things of my own, which precludes reading books that are not of immediate concern for me. So thanks for the compliment, but please do no… Read moreWhile I appreciate the compliment of being asked to review books, I would prefer not to receive any solicitations. I always have multiple reading projects underway and really do not have the leisure to take on random books. I'm also trying to write a couple of things of my own, which precludes reading books that are not of immediate concern for me. So thanks for the compliment, but please do not invite me to be your friend in order to solicit a book review.
I live in Chicago but from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet consider myself an Arkansan. Was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, but still feel an intense love and affiliation with my flawed but marvelous home state, even though I haven't lived there since turning 21. I got my BA in Drama and Religion from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, before going on to get a masters at Yale Divinity School. I later did all but my dissertation on a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Chicago.
My passions in life are unequally divided between my daughter Elizabeth, reading, movies, music, writing, and computer gaming.
My reading, as my reviews show, is spread widely among a large number of fields. My first love is probably literature, though I am passionately interested in intellectual history, philosophy, and religion. Among my favorite authors are Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Trollope, Yeats, Whitman, Samuel Johnson, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Thoreau, and Dashiell Hammett.
My tastes in music run primarily towards what used to be called alternative rock until Nirvana turned it into pop. Among my musical gods/favorite bands are Dylan, PJ Harvey, the Wipers, the Stones, Van Morrison, the Clash, Television, Pere Ubu, the Velvet Underground, Elvis Costello, Big Star, Eleventh Dream Day, Yo La Tenga, Roy Orbison, Tracy Nelson, Richard Thompson, and many, many others.
My two great achievements in life may be (1) once hitting 124 of 125 free throws and (2) winning the Silver Screen Edition of Trivia Pursuit on one turn. I have been a passionate viewer of movies virtually my whole life. Although I try to see many of the current ones, my main passion is for old Hollywood films of the thirties and forties. Favorite directors include Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Mitchell Leisen, Preston Sturges, Akira Kurosawa, Rene Clair, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, and John Ford. I am also an unfashionable lover of old British films by the Boulting brothers and the Ealing Studios. Among my favorite performers are the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, and, above all, Fred Astaire. I love just about any kind of film as long as it doesn't feature prominently knives, chainsaws, exploding skulls, or madmen wielding ice hooks. As a film buff and intellectual, I esteem foreign films in general less highly than one might anticipate. Although I like many specific films by non-American filmmakers, by and large I feel it is a medium that the US has largely dominated. A jingoist in no other matter, I do feel that film is something the US has always done better than anyone else.
I should add that I am an avid Cub fan, but that otherwise my sports loyalties are to my Razorbacks. Politically, I am what George Bush (daddy Bush) would call 'beyond the pale.' I consider his son to be not only a bad president, but the worst in the history of the United States. Religiously, I am a lapsed fundamentalist best described as a Zen Baptist.
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Contributions
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Mark Blyth in this superb book engages in the demolition of the inexplicably popular idea of governmental austerity as a way of correcting the worldwide financial problems. Amid an international financial crisis caused almost entirely by the private sector, the world has somehow been sold the story that the only way to solve the world's economic problems is by governments, whose spending is blamed for a crisis that they did not cause. One of the marvels of our age has been how the Right has been able to sell the public on a long string of absurd economic ideas. George H. W. Bush describing Reagan's revision of trickle down economics as "Voodoo Economics" described it as well as anyone… Read more
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I don't remember the last time I was so inclined to like a book only to find myself tremendously disappointed. My only previous experience with Sloterdijk was twenty years ago when I was in grad school studying philosophy. His CRITIQUE OF CYNICAL REASON was fun, partly because I never really took it seriously. But this one I from the outset expected to take seriously. Anyone who loves Rilke instantly recognizes the title from "Archaic Torso of Apollo," with its extraordinary line, which provides the title of Sloterdijk's book. Early in the book Sloterdijk claims to be able to provide insights because no one had ever previously possessed his particular technique. It sounds so 19th… Read more
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Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Sometime in the past year or two we reached a tipping point where storage space on external (and internal) hard drives has become delightfully inexpensive. This Seagate hard drive is a superb example of this. A super fast 3 TB hard drive for less than $150. So far in using it, it has operated transparently in the background. It automatically backs up my hard drive according to how I program it. And this is pretty much the way it ought to be. If a hard drive is doing its job, there ought to be very nearly nothing to say about it except that it is doing its job. So if you need a large volume hard drive for a very reasonable price, you won't do much better than this one.
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The third part of the complete list of books and graphic novels I've finished reading in 2009.
Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heidegger is often regarded as one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers of all time. In fact, his ideas are not as difficult as the language in which they are couched. One of the keys to&hellip Read more
Leonard Cohen:
Leonard Cohen is, by any measure, one of the foremost songwriters of his age, writing songs of lyrical brilliance that are surpassed only by Bob Dylan, and then only Bob Dylan at his best. Cohen's "Hallelujah" may end up being a victim of its own brilliance. For many&hellip Read more
W. H. Auden's poem entitled "The Geography of the House," talks of the room "the Arabs call the house where everyone goes." (Read his poem in Collected Poems: Auden .) No matter what you call it--bathroom, restroom, toilet, water closet, john, or whatever--a good bathroom needs&hellip Read more
Wish List
Favorite Items
Rock: Big Star, Television, Dylan, Built to Spill, Elvis Costello, Iron and Wine, the Shins, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, Eleventh Dream Day, the Pixies, PJ Harvey, the Mekons, Gram Parsons.
Names rather than Movies: Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Howard Hawks, Astaire and Rogers with or without Astaire or Rogers, Egoyan, the Marx Brothers, Kurosawa, Mitchell Leisen, Billy Wilder, Lombard, Bogart, and any of the classic screwball comedies.
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