Tom Rider's Reviews

Ray Madoff. Immortality and the Law; The Rising Power of the American Dead. Yale University Press, 2011. Paper.
Ray Madoff reminds us that the dead have legal rights and they are flourishing. The most significant of these rights center on the control of wealth from the grave. Children of the deceased, for instance, do not [...]

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Bertrand Patenaude. Trotsky; Downfall of a Revolutionary. Harper Collins, 2010. Paper.
Bernard Patenaude covers Trotsky’s three and a half years of exile in Coyoacán from January 1937 to August 1940 and his assassination. Coyoacán, now a suburb, was then a small town on the edge of Mexico City. Exiled by Josef Stalin in 1928, he spent [...]

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Clive Finlayson. The Humans Who Went Extinct; Why Neaderthals Died Out and We Survived. Oxford University Press, 2010. Paper.
Clive Finlayson poses riddles. For example he asks, Why did Homo sapiens (He calls them Ancestors.) survive and Homo Neanderthalensis disappear? The answer most commonly given is that we outsmarted them, but Finlayson, an evolutionary ecologist, [...]

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Jerome Loving. Mark Twain; The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens. University of California Press, 2011. Paper.
Jerome Loving’s biography focuses on Samuel Clemens’ long career as a writer and public intellectual. It began in California and Nevada. Raised in Hannibal, Missouri, Clemens had accompanied an elder brother west, arriving in Nevada territory during the boom [...]

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Eugene Robinson. Disintegration; The Splintering of Black America. Doubleday, 2010.
Eugene Robinson has been a journalist with the Washington Post for thirty years. He lives in Washington. His book is a plain-speaking, but compelling look at the present demographic landscape of a disintegrating black America and the implications of that development for the larger society. [...]

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