I have four reviews, which I'll give in order from most to least positive. I apologize for the length. John Lanchester's review in the New Yorker ("Melting into air," November 10, 2008, p. 80-84) is actually an article discussing several books that predicted our current economic problems. ...

I cast my middle-of-the-road vote (3) partly because I'm economically ignorant and am not sure how to evaluate Phillips's arguments; and partly because Phillips' analysis seemed kind of patchy in parts, more clever than careful, and just plain disorganized. I tried several times to outline a chapter...

Thanks, but it's luck mostly. Your description of a creepy, nightmarish alternate world just reminded me a lot of Cabal, Weaveworld,and Imajica. But you said it was for middle schoolers. I checked to see whether Barker had any pre-1996 YA novels, and The Thief of Always was the only candidate. The d...

He does say something a bit odd about Canada: "Threats to U.S. oil interests arose in places Washington had long taken for granted: Latin America, the Arabian Peninsula, in small ways even Canada." He never elaborates on the Canadian threats, so I'm not sure what he's talking about. I woul...

The Shack .... worst book ever. I'd put this into the category of "Smarmy self-help" and call the whole category "Worst book ever," because they all seem to be roughly the same thing. I don't care whether it's called "The Shack," "The secret," or "The Ce...

It looks like the article DWill references is for subscription only, but here are a couple of articles from NASA. I'm not an astrophysicist, and don't pretend to know about these things, but it has been my understanding that solar flares are very unpredictable. So what makes us so sure the next batc...

Petroski's point is well taken, but I wonder whether he missed Obama's point. The Bush administration was notoriously hostile to science, from ignoring research on climate change, to squelching studies that exploded mythology about a link between abortion and cancer, to firing environmentalists who ...

This reminds me very much of Clive Barker's work. I haven't read it yet, but could you be remembering his 1992 novel, The Thief of Always?

I also am not an economist, and the various financial instruments are bewildering. But the most confusing thing about the writing is the way Phillips jumps back and forth in time. He does this on a large scale, switching from 2007 to 19th-century Britain to 18th-century Holland. He also does it on a...

I'm a middle-aged librarian from Missouri. As a kid I read voraciously (almost exclusively science fiction and fantasy), but over the last twenty years or so I've read less and less for pleasure. Over the holidays I picked up a mystery/thriller to pass the time, and it reminded me why I used to spen...