Gotz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries doesn’t look like an explosive book. Written in a dry, unsensational style, it studies that driest and least sensational of subjects: public finance.
Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, but it might be said that his supreme accolade came in 1994, when Islamic extremists attempted to assassinate him.
American Public Radio’s Marketplace program invited me to nominate a business book for summer reading. By happenstance, I had just finished rereading (well, rehearing) Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit and was inspired to select it.
Speaking of spy fiction — spy literature I should say in this case — I finished the audiobook of Alan Furst’s Blood of Victory on the elliptical machine yesterday.
Charlie Peters, former editor of the Washington Monthly, is one of those very partisan Democrats to whom the only good Republican is a dead Republican.