Fritz Stern was born in what was then Breslau, Germany, grandson of Jews who converted to Christianity, son and grandson of physicians and researchers, at a time when medicine was truly becoming a science and Germany was leading the way. His godfather and namesake was Fritz Haber, who discovered how to fix atmospheric nitrogen, won …
Category: Review
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/12/five-germanys-i-have-known-by-fritz-stern/
Feb 11 2007
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson
What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a quarter? That’s the question posed by Robbie Vann-Adibe, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company, a question that launches Wired’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, on his exploration of more …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/11/the-long-tail-by-chris-anderson/
Feb 11 2007
The Orientalist by Tom Reiss
Ali and Nino, the closest thing that modern Azerbaijan has to a national novel, was first published in German in 1937, sold in various translations, hit US bestseller lists in the early 1970s and bears the name Kurban Said as its author. But the question of the author’s identity had never been resolved. All anyone …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/11/the-orientalist-by-tom-reiss/
Feb 07 2007
Premature Evaluation: Albion’s Seed
Why is America the way that it is? Wrong question, the author of Albion’s Seed would say. America isn’t any one way, and hasn’t been since the very beginning of European, particularly English, colonization. David Hackett Fischer puts the core of his argument straight into his subtitle: Four British Folkways in America. He identifies four …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/02/07/premature-evaluation-albions-seed/
Oct 13 2006
A Pocketful of Pamuk
The definitive(ish) review I’ve been meaning to write for months will obviously have to wait now that Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here are the AFOE talking points on Pamuk: Snow is the one book to read if you only have time to read one. Ka, the protagonist, is a Turkish …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/10/13/a-pocketful-of-pamuk/
Sep 26 2006
Ringworld by Larry Niven
I hadn’t read Ringworld in at least a decade, and probably closer to two, when I picked it up again a couple of weeks back. Originally published in 1970, the book has held up terrifically. Not for Niven, one of those far-future societies that’s a replication of the author’s own era. The use of “men” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/26/ringworld-by-larry-niven/
Sep 26 2006
Premature Evaluation: Khrushchev by William Taubman
Wish an 876-page biography could be longer? Not often, but definitely with this one. I don’t know the literature well enough to say for sure, but it sure feels like a definitive take on an important figure of 20th century history. William Taubman combines the virtues of journalist and scholar in his biography of Nikita …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/26/premature-evaluation-khrushchev-by-william-taubman/
Sep 20 2006
Baltic Framework
Our recent posts on governments in Stockholm and Schwerin are as good a reason as any to highlight Northern Shores, by Alan Palmer. (It’s published in the US as The Baltic.) I had intended to write a premature evaluation, but then I finished the book, which I picked up during a business trip to Helsinki, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/20/baltic-framework/
Sep 20 2006
Noted With Pleasure: Reindeer People
One of the other books that I picked up while in Helsinki was Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, by Piers Vitebsky. (US paperback coming in December.) He’s an anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, and the reindeer people are his research specialty. The book, however, is an engrossing synthesis aimed at …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/09/20/noted-with-pleasure-reindeer-people/
Apr 18 2006
Premature Evaluation: The Hungarians
I suppose I should be happy that there is a recent, one-volume general history of the Hungarians. Their history is not exactly the stuff of bestsellers, even if Hungarians were crucial in everything from computers to the atomic bomb to Hollywood studios. Ten million people, give or take, speaking a non-Indo-European language in and around …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/04/18/premature-evaluation-the-hungarians/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire