Tom Rider's Reviews

Jens Franzen. The Rise of Horses; 55 Minnion Years of Evolution, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
The horse family, Equus, includes the modern horse – Equus caballus, asses, half asses, and zebras. Horses are related to tapirs and surprisingly rhinoceroses, other odd-toed ungulates. The odd-toed ungulates arose in the Eocene age; Jens Franzen refers to those [...]

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Robin LeBlanc is a social scientist looking at Japanese politics on the “local” level and in particular those who run for elected district assemblies. The book reflects over a decade of observations, beginning in 1999. She looks at two electoral districts, the town of Takeno-machi and the Shirakawa district in Tokyo with over ten times [...]

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Stephen Ortiz, a UF graduate, has written an interesting book on the impact of World War I veterans on American political life in the 1920s and 1930s. WW I veterans – doughboys – had mostly entered the army as conscripts. After the war, they argued that they should receive compensation for their time in the [...]

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There were, of course, many possible ‘slants’ in the reporting of the World Trade Center’s destruction on September 11, 2001. Brian Monahan has explained how the media chose among those options. By a considered selection of words and images, the news was constructed into a serialized public drama with dramatic, interesting, and relatable characters. We [...]

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