Category: Book Reviews

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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November 22, 2016

Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews *** (of 4)

The second in the series involving a a love affair that really should never happen between an American CIA spy, Nathanial Nash and the mole he...

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October 31, 2016

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald **** (of 4)

Three parallel stories expertly told. In the first, the author trains a goshawk to fly from her glove to hunt pheasants and rabbits on the British...

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October 20, 2016

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan *** (of 4)

This recounting of America’s dust bowl is a vivid, filthy painting of an American environmental disaster brought about by greed, hubris, and ignorance. After demolishing...

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October 20, 2016

Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting by Ian Frazier *** (of 4)

Many of the essays, interviews, and reports collected here were first published in the New Yorker, but not one of them is less interesting reading a...

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September 28, 2016

The Lantern Bearers by Rosemary Sutcliff ** (of 4)

It is the middle of the fifth century, though you would have to know that on your own, as there is no indication in the...

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September 25, 2016

Children of the Arbat *** (of 4) by Anatoli Rybakov

The Arbat is a Moscow neighborhood; its children are the teens and twenty-somethings caught up in Stalin’s increasingly repressive communism of the 1930s. These youth...

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August 30, 2016

Kosher USA by Roger Horowitz *** (of 4)

How does a food receive kosher approval? For some items, like the prohibition of pork, the Torah is comparatively clear. But what about a more...

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August 18, 2016

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi *** (of 5)

Gyasi uses her own experience as a Ghanaian American to create an original tale of history. We are asked to follow the descendants of one...

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August 18, 2016

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny *** (of 4)

Maybe the tenth in the series of mysteries for Chief Detective of the Quebec Surete, Armand Gamache. Having recently retired to Three Pines, now former...

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