Books and Breads Blog

November 30, 2012

Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon ** (of 4)

Very rarely is an author’s style so obstructionist that it interferes, but sadly, Kanon’s frequent indecipherability kept me from finishing. Too bad. I was in...

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November 15, 2012

The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak *** (of 5)

Jozef Ondrej is taken by his father as an infant, after his mother dies, to the mountains of central Europe on the eve of the...

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November 15, 2012

Home by Toni Morrison *** (of 5)

An African American soldier returns from fighting in Korea with his mind in tatters. The army was integrated and ordered, but his experience was profoundly horrifying....

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October 28, 2012

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro **** (of 4)

Third in Caro’s serial biography of Lyndon Johnson, this massive volume covers Johnson’s decade in the Senate. For most of the 1950s LBJ ran the...

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October 28, 2012

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers *** (of 4)

In this rewrite of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, aptly named Alan Clay, a former salesman of Schwinn bicycles finds himself in Saudi Arabia trying...

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October 11, 2012

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman *** (of 4)

Richard Mayhew, a boring British office worker, finds himself fighting for his life in London Below, a dark mysterious world beneath London’s subway system. Heroes...

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September 27, 2012

Boomerang by Michael Lewis *** (of 4)

After a wave of unprecedented cheap credit swept the western world in the mid 2000s, Michael Lewis traveled to Europe, Iceland, and California to ask...

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September 9, 2012

Journey to Shiloh by Will Henry *** (of 4)

A Texas yarn about 7 teenagers who leave hill country to fight for the Confederate Army in the Battle of Shiloh. Tough and country-wise after...

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August 13, 2012

1493 by Charles Mann *** (of 4)

Prior to Columbus’s blundering into the Caribbean, there was negligible interchange of plants, animals, or humans between continents. Shortly thereafter the onset of large-scale globalization...

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August 6, 2012