Peter Sagal

Hard hitting legal drama about a holocaust denier that gets a lot of bite from not reducing the issue to caricatures and the work of an utter idiot. Letting someone morally repugnant actually win exchanges and have legitimate points takes the ethical stakes to a place they don't usually get. The free speech dilemmas are only heightened.

I did nothing else last night or all day today except read this book. It was that entertaining. I laughed out loud a couple of times. I enjoyed that I knew his voice so well I could hear him in my head (I listen to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me regularly).

Peter Sagal's The Book of Vice purports to be an exploration of "very naughty things and how to do them", but it's not as shallow as that sounds. It's mostly a sociological and psychological study of people who do these things (and study those who do these things), where the discussion is led by Sagal's dipping his toes, so to speak, into experiencing each of the questionable activities.Unfortunately, it's a flawed study and never really gets to why people do the things they do, which may be show more an unreasonable expectation on my part. Instead, as I went through each of the chapters, the essential tawdriness of the experience came out. For some reason, I thought temptation would be more, well, tempting. Also disappointing was the lack of humor in the book. Even though he tried, he just wasn't that funny. And this is a subject that seems to me would be hard not to be funny about.

I can't recommend The Book of Vice, really. As I worked my way through it, I kept thinking I could have been reading so many more useful, entertaining things. It's not awful, just not that interesting. show less

interesting comments on running by a serious runner who barely escapes being in the line of sight of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; very much about the pain of his separation and subsequent divorce and how running helped him get through this period, fortunately it ends on a higher note with a new relationship