Category: FOUR STARS ****

September 28, 2017

March: Book Three by Andrew Aydin, John Lewis, and John Noel Claude Lewis **** (of 4)

This is the final installment of the biography of Congressman John Lewis’s youthful campaign for civil rights for America’s black population. Books One and Two cover...

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August 20, 2017

In the Kingdom of Ice by Hamptom Sides **** (of 4)

At the end of the nineteenth century, because no one had ever been there, the virtual consensus among geographers was that the North Pole resided...

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August 17, 2017

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead **** (of 4)

Before Colson Whitehead ever gets to the story of Cora’s attempted escape from enslavement, he sets the stage in Africa. Cora’s grandmother and mother are...

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July 28, 2017

News of the World by Paulette Jiles **** (of 4)

The year is 1870. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, veteran of three wars, now age 72, is more or less handed a ten-year-old girl to return...

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July 17, 2017

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance **** (of 4)

The simple description is on the cover. J.D. Vance, a self-denominated hillbilly from Kentucky, describes what it took to grow up in a family devoid...

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March 31, 2017

Regeneration by Pat Barker **** (of 4)

Most of the action takes place away from the European trenches of World War I. Instead, Dr. Rivers uses the new field of psychoanalysis to...

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March 7, 2017

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman **** (of 4)

Ove awakens at the same hour every morning and sees no reason to change any part of his routine that begins with close inspection of...

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February 16, 2017

The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee **** (of 4)

Mukherjee begins with the ancient Greeks. They wondered from whom and how did children inherit characteristics that made them look like their parents. Mukherjee continues...

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December 1, 2016

The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George **** (of 4)

It seems to me that even mediocre authors can write tragedies. As long as a protagonist is reasonably sympathetic and something awful occurs, the reader...

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October 31, 2016