"His book tells the story of a family living under Gaddafi in the 60’s and 70’s, from the perspective of a young boy. The boy’s father falls under sus"His book tells the story of a family living under Gaddafi in the 60’s and 70’s, from the perspective of a young boy. The boy’s father falls under suspicion and Matar’s book describes the tale of what unfolds in the neighborhood, the mistrust and betrayal amongst adults that filters down to the child. It’s an amazing book to read now, given all that’s happening in Libya." - Maria Woltjen ...more
"Richly details life in the slums of nineteenth-century London and, more fanstastically, aboard a whaling ship in that industry’s waning days. At the "Richly details life in the slums of nineteenth-century London and, more fanstastically, aboard a whaling ship in that industry’s waning days. At the risk of revealing too much plot, I’ll say that the book was most resonant for me in capturing the seafaring culture behind that horribly fascinating staple of criminal law casebooks: the custom of the sea. " - Laura Weinrib...more
"Like Larson's earlier work, 'Devil in the White City,' 'In the Garden of the Beast' is a great read. Also like Devil in the White City, it grows out "Like Larson's earlier work, 'Devil in the White City,' 'In the Garden of the Beast' is a great read. Also like Devil in the White City, it grows out of Hyde Park. It tells the true story of University of Chicago history professor William Dodd and his family in Nazi Germany. In 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt tapped Dodd to serve as the United States ambassador to Germany shortly after Hitler's rise to power. In the Garden of Beasts offers a first-hand account of Berlin at this critical moment. I recommend it highly for light but informative and engaging reading." - Geoffrey R. Stone [2011]
"[A book] about the worthy William Dodd who became by default the US Ambassador to Germany and against his own inclinations became a quiet hero against the Nazi regime. It reminds us how easy it was for people to get sucked into thinking that you could do business with the Germans." - Richard A. Epstein [2012]...more
"Edward Glaeser is a graduate of our Economics Department and currently a professor of economics at Harvard University. The book argues convincingly t"Edward Glaeser is a graduate of our Economics Department and currently a professor of economics at Harvard University. The book argues convincingly that cities have a comparative advantage with respect to economic productivity and human flourishing. As part of his analysis Glaeser argues for policies that favor market-based development and high levels of education." - Michael Schill ...more
"First, Fit to Serve is authored by our alumnus and former Dean of Students Jim Hormel, ‘58. Jim’s book is a very interesting personal memoir of his l"First, Fit to Serve is authored by our alumnus and former Dean of Students Jim Hormel, ‘58. Jim’s book is a very interesting personal memoir of his life culminating in the controversy surrounding his appointment as the first openly gay American ambassador to a foreign nation." -Michael Schill ...more
"When you account for the repetition within the book, creates a feeling a bit like what I imagine life is like on that whaling ship. At least the fact"When you account for the repetition within the book, creates a feeling a bit like what I imagine life is like on that whaling ship. At least the facts are fairly clear." -Adam Samaha...more
"This book covers important current events with glimpses of behind-the-scenes conversations between living participants, but the book is hardly the be"This book covers important current events with glimpses of behind-the-scenes conversations between living participants, but the book is hardly the best economics primer and has a poor man's Bob Woodward quality to it." - Adam Samaha [2011]
"This is an easy entry into a part of world history that I knew next to nothing about. Others might find this offputting, but I appreciate the recogni"This is an easy entry into a part of world history that I knew next to nothing about. Others might find this offputting, but I appreciate the recognition of irreducible uncertainty surrounding relatively straightforward events. We might have confidence in our ability to identify significant military encounters, shifts in formal law, and major changes in societal power structures, but so much of interest remains in the fog." - Adam Samaha...more
"Recently I finished Melville's Moby Dick (audio book), which I started during a 70-hour round-trip expedition to Tel Aviv to present an article. The "Recently I finished Melville's Moby Dick (audio book), which I started during a 70-hour round-trip expedition to Tel Aviv to present an article. The subject matter seemed fitting. The reader for my version of the book, by the way, has stage-actor skills; he makes Ahab sound like a stereotypical pirate from a children's television cartoon. Amusing." - Adam Samaha ...more
"The book is an ideal blend of biography, philosophy, and cultural history." - Eric Posner"The book is an ideal blend of biography, philosophy, and cultural history." - Eric Posner...more
"Actually, I'm listening to it as an audiobook, read by a gifted and hilarous reader, and today as I ran I reached the wonderful part where Mr. Micawb"Actually, I'm listening to it as an audiobook, read by a gifted and hilarous reader, and today as I ran I reached the wonderful part where Mr. Micawber denounces Uriah Heep. I practically skipped around the track. I've been smiling so much as I run these days, both because of the book's humor and because of its generous humanity.
Dickens is childlike, compared to the sophistication of Trollope and the intellectual penetration of George Eliot. But this also means that he has access to the child in himself, to what David the narrator describes as the fresh delight in the world that children have and that a few adults manage to retain. He also has a child's sense of evil. His bad characters are nightmare figures, and grotesque in the way that dreams are grotesque. One should not forget, however, how real they also are:
I've seen the school where "Wackford Squeers" of Nicholas Nickleby tortured unwanted children; and in David Copperfield we see a range of examples of all-too-real domestic cruelty, from Mr. Murdstone, who slithers into the Copperfield household and destroys David's trusting mother, to the minor character of the gypsy woman David meets on the road, bearing telltale bruises from her abusive husband. (One thing I realized this time through is that Amy Chua's "tiger mother" view of education is neither new nor particularly Asian: it is exactly the Murdstone doctrine of "firmness.") The child's view of evil is uncompromising and unapologetic. Like the fresh delight of childhood, we lose it at our peril. But the child also understands that love can overcome evil, and the novel's most memorable characters are those who, though abused, do not succumb to bitterness or revenge: Betsey Trotwood, Daniel Peggotty, David himself. For all these reasons, reconnecting with the novel is a way of reconnecting with parts of ourselves that are fragile in a world of uncertainty." - Martha Nussbaum...more
"On the eve of a planned mother-son hiking trip after the son’s completion of his military duty, the son instead voluntarily re-enlists for a new mili"On the eve of a planned mother-son hiking trip after the son’s completion of his military duty, the son instead voluntarily re-enlists for a new military offensive, cancelling the trip. The mother (recently separated from her husband and now again from her son) somewhat impulsively decides to go on the hike with an old friend instead. Essentially, in her mind, if she is not home to receive any “news” from the army about her son, nothing bad can happen to him—so the hike and her extended retelling of her son’s life during the course of the hike become her talisman protecting him. The language also beautifully describes the land in the Galilee through which they are hiking. The story is all the more poignant because the author’s son was killed in the Israel-Lebanon conflict while he was in the middle of writing the book." - Joan Neal ...more
"This book was published in the 1940s, but recently rediscovered and translated. (Sadly, Marai’s work was suppressed in Hungary by the Communists, and"This book was published in the 1940s, but recently rediscovered and translated. (Sadly, Marai’s work was suppressed in Hungary by the Communists, and only republished there after his death.) It is a very short book that recounts a conversation that occurs during one evening between two estranged old friends who have not spoken to one another in 40 years following a specific incident of betrayal (no spoilers here). Actually, it is almost a monologue, as one of the men narrates the course of their friendship, what happened and how he figured it out, while the other man primarily listens and validates the events. Although the book simply recounts a conversation between two old men, it is a page-turner, and the simple and beautiful language perfectly describe a particular time and place, as well as the complicated friendship between the two men. This is one of the best books I have read in the past year, and I intend to seek out other books by Marai now." - Joan Neal...more
"It's a book to read when thinking about how tethered our children are to the internet, and how optimistic we might be about that irrepressible medium"It's a book to read when thinking about how tethered our children are to the internet, and how optimistic we might be about that irrepressible medium and the rise of democracy." - Saul Levmore...more
"Simon spent a year embedded with the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department, following a squad of detectives as they dealt with cases b"Simon spent a year embedded with the homicide division of the Baltimore Police Department, following a squad of detectives as they dealt with cases both mundane and bizarre. The book is fascinating in large part because it describes the often conflicting forces that pull on police detectives as they go about their jobs. Their superiors within the police department demand that cases be “cleared,” meaning that the police have decided who has committed a murder regardless of whether that person is ever charged; prosecutors need admissible evidence that can be used to obtain convictions or plea bargains; and the detectives themselves are often torn between their sense of duty to the police force and to the city, their desire for overtime pay, and their preference for time off. Simon depicts the colorful characters of the homicide division and their struggles with these issues in engrossing detail." - Jonathan Masur ...more
"My best recommendation is Peter the Great by Peter K. Massie, which I found myself talking about with total strangers on airplanes." - Saul Levmore"My best recommendation is Peter the Great by Peter K. Massie, which I found myself talking about with total strangers on airplanes." - Saul Levmore...more
"An engaging book about President Garfield and his assassin, which turns out, in part, to be about Alexander Graham Bell as well as about ignorant doc"An engaging book about President Garfield and his assassin, which turns out, in part, to be about Alexander Graham Bell as well as about ignorant doctors." - Saul Levmore
"Recounts the horrible and amazing story of the murder of James Garfield. Millard moves across multiple subjects, the politics leading to Garfield’s election, the motive of his assassin, the efforts of Alexander Graham Bell to save his President, the failures of pre-antiseptic medicine, and the succession of Chester Arthur." - Richard McAdams...more
"Smith is a philosopher with a strong interest in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. His book offers a gripping history of the horrific wa"Smith is a philosopher with a strong interest in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. His book offers a gripping history of the horrific ways in which human beings have turned other humans into “sub-humans” and “beasts in human form,” from American rhetoric rationalizing African slavery, to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, to the justifications offered for the genocide in Rwanda. He identifies a key thematic in all these campaigns of dehumanization: namely, convincing the persecutors that, when it comes to the persecuted, there is a difference between being essentially human and merely appearing human. He then speculates (not always plausibly, but provocatively nonetheless) that the propensity to draw an essence/appearance distinction is a legacy of natural selection itself. One need not find the evolutionary speculation convincing to nonetheless find his synthesis of the ways in which the essence/appearance distinction figures in the rhetoric of hatred and genocide throughout history insightful and memorable." - Brian Leiter...more
"This book interweaves several centuries of English history with the story of a mid-twentieth-century teenage girl, to exhilarating and dizzying effec"This book interweaves several centuries of English history with the story of a mid-twentieth-century teenage girl, to exhilarating and dizzying effect." - Alison LaCroix...more
"It’s a highly readable state-by-state narrative of a strangely understudied period in American political and constitutional history. Maier paints a v"It’s a highly readable state-by-state narrative of a strangely understudied period in American political and constitutional history. Maier paints a vivid picture of the many uncertainties surrounding the ratification process: would there have to be a second constitutional convention to consider amendments proposed in the states? Were local assemblies and town meetings authorized to debate the merits of the Constitution? What difference did the sequence in which the state conventions met have for the way the debates unfolded? Maier’s story breathes life and speech into the familiar but amorphous concept of 'we the people.'" - Alison LaCroix...more
"Mantel tells the story of King Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell with a sympathetic eye. It is a corrective to Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Wolf"Mantel tells the story of King Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell with a sympathetic eye. It is a corrective to Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. Wolf Hall has no trace of antiquarianism. As a stylist, Mantel writes with a shocking and visceral immediacy that is contemporary, even startling. Almost as an afterthought, she paints the story of how the Tudor state developed." - Aziz Huq
"I was in Europe on my choir’s concert tour, and it was particularly fascinating to imagine how the medieval cathedrals I was touring were the only Biblical “text” available for ordinary churchgoers at the time in which the book is set, when it was illegal to distribute the scriptures in the people’s native tongue. The book is a fictionalized biography (or biographized fiction?) about Thomas Cromwell, who is depicted as a lawyer’s lawyer. His ability to understand his clients better than they understand themselves and negotiate for their—and his—advancement is astounding. He is well-rounded and insightful. But there are always questions lurking about whether he has lost his own integrity in pursuing his work. I highly recommend it." - Beth Milnikel...more
"This book persuasively challenged my preconception of France as a historically centralized state. With a picaresque take on history, Robb turns the d"This book persuasively challenged my preconception of France as a historically centralized state. With a picaresque take on history, Robb turns the dry tale of the French state’s surprisingly late geographic extension into an absorbing read. Robb, famous before for his Flaubert biography, also writes elegantly." - Aziz Huq...more
"It is an entertaining way for the ignorant (like me) to learn more about what has happened in China since the Cultural Revolution ended." - Richard H"It is an entertaining way for the ignorant (like me) to learn more about what has happened in China since the Cultural Revolution ended." - Richard Helmholz...more
"I try to avoid the term “children’s literature.” I read Animal Farm for the first time when I was eight years old, and, thanks to a very insistent fo"I try to avoid the term “children’s literature.” I read Animal Farm for the first time when I was eight years old, and, thanks to a very insistent four-year-old, I read Winnie-The-Pooh for the first time at thirty-five. I would say that was just about right." - William Hubbard...more
"This is a collection of short essays, just the right length for reading over breakfast, about some of the more famous battles in history. Each essay’"This is a collection of short essays, just the right length for reading over breakfast, about some of the more famous battles in history. Each essay’s goal is to illuminate the central ploy or critical error that turned the battle. As such, the Atlas provides both tidbits from the history of warfare and interesting studies of human decision making." - William Hubbard ...more
"This book is a fascinating critique—so well-written and entertaining—of our contemporary culture of choice and the anxiety that surrounds these times"This book is a fascinating critique—so well-written and entertaining—of our contemporary culture of choice and the anxiety that surrounds these times. Salecl discusses the self-help industry that has burgeoned to help us deal with choosing, and all the ways in which we subvert choice in order to get it over with. Here is a delicious passage that opens the book at page 8: “Today’s advice culture presents the search for a spouse as not all that different from the search for a car: first we need to weigh up all the advantages and disadvantages, then we need to secure a prenuptial agreement, mend things if they go wrong and eventually trade in the old model for a new one, before getting tired of all the hassle of commitment and deciding to go for a temporary lease agreement.” Happy readings!" - Bernard Harcourt ...more
"It’s a book that fits the way I teach the Comparative Legal Institutions course at Chicago: law across all time and space." - Tom Ginsburg"It’s a book that fits the way I teach the Comparative Legal Institutions course at Chicago: law across all time and space." - Tom Ginsburg...more
"This is a fun read, at least for the first 2/3. The Steel Wheels tour didn’t interest me much. But in general I was struck by the Richards’ insights "This is a fun read, at least for the first 2/3. The Steel Wheels tour didn’t interest me much. But in general I was struck by the Richards’ insights into music as a collective enterprise. And the ability of Jagger and Richards to maintain a partnership over many decades, despite the way in which they grew far apart." - Tom Ginsburg...more
"A novel/autobiography depicting the journey of one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys” from war-torn Sudan to Ethiopia and ultimately to the United States. I stil"A novel/autobiography depicting the journey of one of Sudan’s “Lost Boys” from war-torn Sudan to Ethiopia and ultimately to the United States. I still don’t know how I feel about this beautifully written narrative from which I learned a good deal about Sudanese and African history. But I do know that it made me examine my own humanity in ways that I hadn’t before and that it was well worth a read." - Craig Futterman...more
"This is an exquisitely crafted novel about a man’s reckoning with his past—for me it is really about two things: first, whether it is better to live "This is an exquisitely crafted novel about a man’s reckoning with his past—for me it is really about two things: first, whether it is better to live a peaceful but unexamined life, or a more challenging and unsettled life, based on deep searching and reflection (at Chicago, of course, there can be little doubt on which of these two is better!); and second, about how small choices can have large and unpredictable consequences, and the difficult questions of moral responsibility this can raise. The book has been described as “very English,” but the Australian and American in me still greatly enjoyed it…both for its prose and its narrative. It is also a nice short read, for those of us who are busy!" - Rosalind Dixon ...more
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