Owing to recent format constraints, the history and statistics for the present blog are contained in a post shown below. Please go to “Home” and scroll to the post entitled, “About Blog/Statistics.”  There have been over eighteen thousand readings of the reviews in the present blog from readers in eighty-nine countries. I have reviewed over […]

Opinion. Today a catastrophe owing to a Blunder of blunders in starting a civilization-ending nuclear war remains an historically unprecedented threat 24/7. There is a crack in the dam; yet many seem to be hoping that the dam will hold indefinitely. The present book by William J. Perry, the 19th Secretary of Defense, and Tom […]

Night Train, a parodic but nevertheless lacerating 1997 novel by the accomplished Martin Amis, son of British novelist Kingsley Amis and a writer who takes on the nightmares of our time such as the Nazis, Stalin and nuclear weapons, is an unusual mystery novel turning on our inevitable and human delving into the nature of […]

Opinion. In the midst of the current assault on our Democracy and Republic, some good news arrives in Ryan Reilly’s new book, Sedition Hunters. These hunters–Reilly calls them “online sleuths”–are of all sizes and shapes, as it were, and located virtually everywhere from sea to shining sea. Here is a terse characterization of his lengthy […]

Opinion. Leave the World Behind has a nightmarish quality that makes it an important if flawed movie. The film adaptation of Ramaan Alam’s apocalyptic novel of the same name signals a growing spirit of these days, a fatalistic and pessimistic realization that we are in both an Age of Technology and an unprecedented Time of Existential […]

(Roger Ailes’) political, cultural, and programming sense converged into a single perception. It was a demographic appreciation of the radical disparities that had grown in American life–the wealth disparity, the education disparity, the generational disparity, the technological disparity, the gender disparity, the religion disparity, the white and others disparity, and the great rural-urban divide. There […]

Democracy is a very bad form of government…but all the others are so much worse. –Winston Churchill Enough is a heartening reminder that somehow, and so far, we are managing to preserve our Democracy, ever embattled and direly threatened though it remains. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s chief aide, twenty-five-year-old Cassidy Hutchinson, working at […]

When I’m goin’, when I’m really goin’, I feel like a…like a jockey must feel when he’s sittin’ on his horse, he’s got all that speed and power underneath him, he’s coming into the stretch, the pressure’s on him–and he knows. He just feels when to let it go and how much. ‘Cause he’s got […]

Opinion. The Courier is a movie chiefly about British businessman Greville Wynne who was recruited in the early 1960s by his own and American Intelligence to conduct during business visits to Russia the secretive back-and-forth with our highly valued informant inside the Soviet hierarchy, Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, on the command, performance details, and deployments of burgeoning […]

NOTE: Starting in September 2021, all reviews–movies, books, general culture–are listed more or less in the order of posting. They are listed under “Home.” Near the end of any current listing of these reviews under “Home,” several are repeated verbatim for purposes of back-up, beginning immediately after the post entitled “Latest Novel.” All 248 reviews prior […]