Leebeck USA

It may be worth reading for the handful of anecdotes about the Justices, but maybe not. Toobin's writing style is not very fresh. Also, the psychology is simple, and his legal and political analysis is not very interesting. I was expecting more than a Democrat's psychology-injected play-by-play of decisions about abortion and school prayer. Yawn. ... (continue)

I like the personalities, the food wisdom, perspective, and humor. Not so great were the passages where Buford tries to write scholarly history. It's 30% too long, but I recommend it.

I like the author's chatty but erudite style. The chapters on Christian and Bohemian solutions to status anxiety are especially enlightening. Sprinkled throughout the book are some really great quotations from philosophers and aphorists. I'm going to read more of his stuff.

I like these Nietzschean genealogies of influencial ideas---liberalism in this case. It's pleasantly upsetting to consider the contingency and incoherence of the projects to which we're most committed. (Beware the sections that are heavy on analytic word-chopping, though.)

A very gentle, subtle, and slow history of and introduction to the basic notions and controversies of probability theory. I am always interested to hear what Hacking has to say, but I picked this particular book up to get some grasp on Bayesian school of probability. The intro to Bayes was short, but all I needed to get a footing. [return][return]Also, I can safely recommend this to non-mathy people since it bills itself as a undergrad philosophy textbook. It is almost too well-written, witty, and opinionated to be called a textbook, though.[return][return]A nit-pick: Hacking's footnote on the inverse gambler's fallacy that discusses it in the context of multiple-universe cosmology is either profound of misleading. It had me staring off in space for about thirty minutes. Go check out the original argument and some other philosophers' replies to it. I think Hacking may have been wrong, but the idea is still brilliant. ... (continue)

Deep, humorous, eclectic, and convincing---this is my favorite kind of philosophy reading.

My introduction to serious, from-the-ground-up, rigorous mathematics. It was used as a textbook for an undergrad course in real analysis I took. Highly recommended. I cannot say I understood any higher courses in math with the same clarity.