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Category Archives: The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
One-A-Day, Tsuneo Yoshikuni, African Urban Experiences in Colonial Zimbabwe: A Social History of Harare Before 1925
I have a tendency to oversell the value of a generalist approach to academic work, partly to try and defend my own practices and interests. I genuinely think that many specialist monographs fail to make a case for their importance, … Continue reading
Posted in Africa, Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
10 Comments
One-A-Day: John Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
I feel like finding new authors to like in genre fiction can be quite difficult. You know who you already like, but the marketing of work by new authors often makes them seem either as if they’re derivative of someone … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Popular Culture, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
1 Comment
One-A-Day: Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey Into the Disturbing World of James Bond
Quite often, I read a book and think to myself that I need to find a class where I can teach the book. Sometimes that’s easy: there’s quite a range of work I can throw into my class on the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
1 Comment
One-A-Day: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History
My next project, if I can put it together, is going to focus on Africa as a whole during the Cold War. So I’ve been diving into the general historiography of the Cold War as much as I can manage … Continue reading
Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
12 Comments
One-a-Day: Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It
I really want to like Lomborg’s work more than I do. I’m completely open to and interested in an argument that a smart cost-benefit analysis of conventional environmentalist policy recommendations suggests that money is best spent on completely different kinds … Continue reading
Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
2 Comments
One-A-Day: A Crack in the Edge of the World
Simon Winchester’s non-fiction is the equivalent of really good popular or genre fiction, it seems to me. Kind of the Stephen King of non-fiction writing. Eminently readable, a clean and accessible style, a good choice of subjects. The Professor and … Continue reading
Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
3 Comments
One-A-Day: The Traveller
I’m going to try very hard to post a least a short commentary on books I’ve read once a day, or close to it, in part to get me away from repetitious entries on a narrow range of issues. Not … Continue reading
Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
Comments Off on One-A-Day: The Traveller
Savage Pastimes
When I started studying the history of debates over children’s television, I was struck at how the principal critics of kidvid in the 1970s and 1980s set the terms of their declension narrative. For them, Saturday morning television was destroying … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Popular Culture, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
10 Comments
Slippery and Sticky
It’s summer, so I’m trying to make a dent in a big pile of books sitting by my desk. One of the first I’ve tackled is Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other … Continue reading
From the Mixed-Up Bookshelves: Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism; Alberto Manguel, The History of Reading
When I spoke to a group of publishers two weeks ago, I said that a world in which there were fewer specialized monographs would be a good thing. Fewer, better (and better-selling, one hopes) books from academics. What do I … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves
5 Comments