April 2003

Berman, Morris. The Twilight of American Culture. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. ISBN 0-393-32169-X.

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Williams, Jonathan, Joe Cribb, and Elizabeth Errington, eds. Money: A History. London: British Museum Press, 1997. ISBN 0-312-21212-7.

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Schneider, Ben Ross, Jr. Travels in Computerland. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974. ISBN 0-201-06737-4.
It's been almost thirty years since I first read this delightful little book, which is now sadly out of print. It's well worth the effort of tracking down a used copy. You can generally find one in readable condition for a reasonable price through the link above or through abebooks.com. If you're too young to have experienced the mainframe computer era, here's an illuminating and entertaining view of just how difficult it was to accomplish anything back then; for those of us who endured the iron age of computing, it is a superb antidote to nostalgia. The insights into organising and managing a decentralised, multidisciplinary project under budget and deadline constraints in an era of technological change are as valid today as they were in the 1970s. The glimpse of the embryonic Internet on pages 241–242 is a gem.

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Greene, Graham. The Comedians. New York: Penguin Books, 1965. ISBN 0-14-018494-5.

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Vertosick, Frank T., Jr. The Genius Within. New York: Harcourt, 2002. ISBN 0-15-100551-6.

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Ferro, Marc. Les tabous de l'histoire. Paris: NiL, 2002. ISBN 2-84111-147-4.

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Waugh, Auberon. Will This Do? New York: Carroll & Graf 1991. ISBN 0-7867-0639-2.
This is about the coolest title for an autobiography I've yet to encounter.

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Begleiter, Steven H. The Art of Color Infrared Photography. Buffalo, NY: Amherst Media, 2002. ISBN 1-58428-065-4.

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Warraq, Ibn [pseud.] ed. What the Koran Really Says. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002. ISBN 1-57392-945-X.
This is a survey and reader of Western Koranic studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A wide variety of mutually conflicting interpretations are presented and no conclusions are drawn. The degree of detail may be more than some readers have bargained for: thirty-five pages (pp. 436–464, 472–479) discuss a single word. For a scholarly text there are a surprising number of typographical errors, many of which would have been found by a spelling checker.

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LaHaye, Tim and Jerry B. Jenkins. Nicolae. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1997. ISBN 0-8423-2924-2.

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Buckley, William F. The Redhunter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. ISBN 0-316-11589-4.
It's not often one spots an anachronism in one of WFB's historical novels. On page 330, two characters imitate “NBC superstar nightly newsers Chet Huntley and David Brinkley” in a scene set in late 1953. Huntley and Brinkley did not, in fact, begin their storied NBC broadcasts until October 29th, 1956.

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