Tom Rider's Reviews

Daniel Hillel has argued in his The Natural History of the Bible that events, characters, and ideas found in the Hebrew scriptures can only be understood in relation to their environmental circumstances. He includes as ‘Biblical environment’ Egypt, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Palestine (Canaan), and the surrounding mountainous areas of present day Turkey and Iraq. The [...]

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Paul Greenberg argues that wild fish populations cannot sustain the increasing world-wide demand for sea protein. The four fisheries that he looks at are the North Atlantic salmon, sea bass, cod, and blue fin tuna. Each occupies two ecosystems – its own, and the family table. He looks at fish farming, which many consider to [...]

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Roger Moorhouse begins his social history of the German capital with an account with the elaborate pageantry surrounding Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday on 20 April 1939. He ends with Hitler’s 56th, days before his suicide in April 1945.
 Despite the outward show of enthusiasm that we see in documentaries of the period, Berliners, Moorhouse contends, were [...]

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This is an impressive example of investigative journalism. In past times we would have called it muckraking. Gary Rivlin has investigated the myriad of companies whose business it is to loan money to the less well-off. Pay-day loans, pawnshops, check cashing, rent-to-own, the cash-in-advance tax return business, the second mortgage market, and used auto-loan financing [...]

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The authors explore how corporate America has created various formulas for the commercial places that dominate the American roadside. They call the formula ‘place – product – packaging.’ Fast-food restaurants with multiple locations, the subject of this book, are the result of a co-ordination of programmatic architecture, interior decoration, the standardized products and services sold, [...]

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