(read aloud)
This book is evocative and charming. It is set in the near north side and wanders throughout the city. It is warm and sensitive but powerful. It is about community, friends, immigrants and it is about the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and about the Lake. It is about business and gangs and the White Soc. The prose is delightful.
Started out well but he lost me when the Mossad showed up. Very complicated plot, unnecessarily done.
Very good articulate exposition. Uses Hegelian dialectic, via negativa, careful scriptural exposition. Talks about marriage, emphasizes the complete otherness of God who reveals himself in Jesus Christ. A detailed chapter about his belief in universal salvation which carefully deals with the relevant scriptures and all the counterarguments. A very useful chapter. Jesus Christ is all and in all of his thinking.
Murder mystery courtroom story, good plot, good characters, fairly good writing. Enjoyable.
Very long series of accounts of horse rides from inn to inn across England. Cobbett is irascible and vehemently in support of the common man against the elite. He is against the aristocracy, the absentee landowners, the clergy who live off taxes and live far from their parishes. He is antisemitic in terms of financial opportunism and biblical interpretation of the times. He had very interesting views of previous population of England in prior times based on the size and proximity of very old large churches. He is delightfully fond of calling very many English landscapes the most beautiful his eye had ever beheld! He went about giving talks which were very well attended. His most vociferous critiques were for paper money, debtors laws, forest use restrictions, and poaching laws. He was an expert on seeds, trees, cottage kitchen gardens and farm economics. He was a prolific writer and pamphleteer. He had a love/hate view of America, where he spent some time.
Written by a philosopher of games. Deals with the problems of metrics and how they capture values, capture subjectivity, and eventually fail. Also how games shed light on these matters. Alternately hopeful and discouraging, he admittedly gives more questions than answers. Not an easy read, but has good examples. He studiously avoids simple fixes and false formulas.
An interesting, very detailed account of progress in understanding bird migration from visual spotting to tiny radios to satellites to isotope measurements in feathers. Our feathered cohabitants of Earth reluctantly tell us their secrets, where they go, how, and why.
