Motif staff writer Michael Bilow offers invariably thoughtful, always erudite, and often highly opinionated reviews of books (and other book-like things), selecting them because he thinks they are interesting to him and therefore possibly also to readers. On the other hand, an ignorant minority might consider him an insufferable bore.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a rare example of the fortunate academic whose subject matter, through no actions of her own, becomes of intense public interest. What she spent a career studying was the rise of Benito Mussolini, the early 20th Century radical who subverted the institutions of democracy to turn Italy into a dictatorship – and […]
There is no shortage of books about diseases through human history, but a few have become definitive classics. I’ve curated an admittedly highly opinionated selection of the best. Some books that arguably would have qualified have been left off simply because they are too old, and medicine changes so rapidly that it could be misleading […]