Book report: Duma Key by Stephen King
I can be a snob sometimes: I enjoyed most movies based on Stephen King novels but read nothing of his until seeing a short story or two early this decade in The New Yorker. The plan’s not to catch up on everything he wrote, but so far I’ve enjoyed [...]
Mr. Boo Klist — liking audio books nearly as much as printed ones — now wants to recommend a new movie that’s gotten ho-hum reviews, Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote.
Even the critics I like get stuck on the probability of its premise, that a presidential election through odd circumstances depends on a single vote, in this [...]
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Book report: An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, by Brock Clarke
Panning a novel that I devoured in 50- to 80-page chunks approaches being disingenuous. Perhaps an An Arsonist’s Guide, released in fall 2007 to overall glowing reviews (though readers on amazon.com gave it only three of five stars), amused me even as [...]
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Book report: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver, with occasional essays by her husband, Steven L. Hopp, and a few thoughts from teenage daughter Camille Kingsolver
In Michael Pollan’s most recent book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, he recommends among other things avoiding foods your grandmother wouldn’t have heard [...]
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Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
Book report: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu
When I saw this title online I had a flashback. In an early primary school year (the early 1960s) Mrs. Friedman gave me for my birthday a subscription to a Disney comic book. Mom [...]
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Book report: The Art of Column Writing: Insider Secrets from Art Buchwald, Dave Barry Arianna Huffington, Pete Hamill and Other Great Columnists, by Suzette Martinez Standring
The reviewing trade has a law that a critic doesn’t write up works created by friends. It’s a group of laws, actually. When a periodical’s staffer or regular contributor writes [...]
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The Democrat-Gazette published today my review of What Orwell Didn’t Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, Andras Szanto, editor. I was so excited by this book, even though it was disappointing, that I wrote three Bricks referring to George Orwell. Two of them were on revelations about today from his 1949 novel [...]
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Book report: The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland
Is that epistolary in your pocket, or am I just glad to see a writer pull it off? Yes, I am impressed, not only for a novel comprising journal entries and letters — and e-mails — but also a novel within a novel.
Discovering a solid comic novel is [...]
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
– Uncle Ellis, No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
Book report: No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
Yes, I read the book first, finishing it a few hours before the matinee.
It’s a contender for the decade’s Great American Novel (2005). NCOM deals [...]
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Wednesday, February 13, 2008
“Book ‘em, Danno” is a stick-in-your-brain phrase
I’ve no memory for this. A book is mentioned and I’ll remember if I’ve read it, and how long ago, and whether it was paper or audio, as I also “read” about 1 1/2 books a month on CD while commuting. (There’s no best verb for drinking in a [...]
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