Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys My rating: 2 of 5 stars British writer Jean Rhys, best known for Wide Sargasso Sea, wrote an autobiographical novel Voyage in the Dark in the late 1930’s. It was picked up as a brave, female opus in the 1960s (surprise!) but, worse […]
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells My rating: 2 of 5 stars H.G. Wells’s classic tale is a minor one in the Western canon, and an outdated, reprehensible one at that. Upfront I should admit I have never seen much value in science fiction, even before I was […]
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. My rating: 5 of 5 stars Imagine a dystopian future where a leviathan federal bureaucracy is captured by a colossal global industry and, corrupting all of society’s major […]
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek My rating: 5 of 5 stars This 1944 classic was the post-war clarion call against collectivism and its glide path to totalitarianism. Controversially for the time, it declared that socialism, communism, and fascism all float in the same collectivist (or Leftist) swamp, […]
The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki My rating: 5 of 5 stars Bill Buckley famously quipped that he would rather be lead by “the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty of Harvard,” a populist observation which still brings a smile to our faces. […]
Deep South: Memory and Observation by Erskine Caldwell My rating: 2 of 5 stars Caldwell (1903-1987) was a reasonably well known novelist in mid-century America, whose name has slipped into the fog of history. I had never read any of his works – those that might ring a bell include […]
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman My rating: 1 of 5 stars Last May, for the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, saw a plethora of tributes to – some say – America’s greatest poet. I had an old edition of Leaves of Grass kicking around for ages, most recently […]
Haunting Paris by Mamta Chaudhry My rating: 4 of 5 stars The book is a beautiful and compelling mystery/ghost story/historic account about Paris and her many ghosts. At a recent book club meeting, we hosted the first time novelist and long-time writer, Mamta Chaudhry, who shared some of her and […]
Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time by Mark Adams My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you need one book while visiting Machu Picchu, take this one. Having said that, Adams’ work falls short in several ways. There’s no one to really […]
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson My rating: 5 of 5 stars What an enticing, and profound, novella this book is! We find ourselves, early 20th century, with pioneer Robert Grainier in the wild northwest corner of Idaho. The characters, tales, and happenings are bigger-than-life American West, permeated by a surrealism […]
A Writer’s Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham My rating: 1 of 5 stars A Writer’s [one note] Notebook The author of Of Human Bondage and reportedly one of the best paid novelists of the 1930’s reduced from fifteen volumes to one his lifetime of notebooks. He explains “I publish it […]
Westward Ha! by S.J. Perelman My rating: 2 of 5 stars As follow-up to Twain’s Innocents Abroad, I recently read Westward Ha! in the globe-trotting vein. Soon after WWII, a magazine named Holiday actually suggested and financed a year-long jaunt around the world for two, shall we say, neurotic New […]
My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgård My rating: 2 of 5 stars As usual: don’t believe the critics. This lionized work from a Norwegian media star, while an odd and, in a voyeuristic way, oddly engrossing book, is also a failure. The confusion starts with the title – […]
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala My rating: 1 of 5 stars This is a very odd, Booker-winning book. Even the title is provocative. The heat is procreation, the dust death (from whence we came). Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s unnamed narrator, referring to her alter-ego and ex-great aunt, puts […]
The Havana Habit by Gustavo Perez Firmat My rating: 2 of 5 stars The Havana Habit comes at an apropos time. Castro helped us to kick the slinky Havana habit back in the 60’s but it looks like it’s back: Cuba out of the closet. Columbia professor and poet Gustavo […]
La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri My rating: 2 of 5 stars Upfront, I am not a poet, and Dante wrote the book for poets about poetry (his own). How do I know? It says so, in the introduction’s first sentence, of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition by Barbara […]
The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness by Peter Matthiessen My rating: 2 of 5 stars The Cloud Forest is a classic of its genre, perhaps undeservedly so. A young Peter Matthiessen, after a few books of fiction, his first divorce, and one wildlife book, sets […]
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner My rating: 5 of 5 stars As I suggested the book to my book club, the least I could do was to moderate the discussion. Faulkner, as everyone knows, is a challenge. When I told my step-mother, she joked that if she went […]
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford My rating: 1 of 5 stars This book is vastly overrated. It pioneered, if that is the right word, the untrustworthy narrator, which may have seemed an innovation a century ago, but now looks worn, disconsolate, like a ramshackle back alley. It also […]
Updike by Adam Begley My rating: 4 of 5 stars Let me say upfront: I’m not usually a fan of biographies. They always end badly. Especially in today’s morally unanchored world, the towering ambition of most lives worthy of a biography leaves a path of destruction on the way to […]
