Category: Book Reviews

July 14, 2010

The Art Thief by Noah Charney ** (of 4)

Mildly entertaining. A Caravaggio is stolen from a baroque church in Italy. A 20th century painting is taken from the Kazimir Melevich Society in Paris....

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July 13, 2010

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel *** (of 4)

A coming of age memoir of a girl discovering her lesbianism at the same moment she is learning that her obsessive-compulisive, tyrannical father was a...

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July 13, 2010

Pleading Guilty by Scott Turow ** (of 4)

A former Irish copper (really, that’s what Turow calls him, a copper) now an ex-alcoholic flunky in a powerful law firm goes on the hunt...

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July 8, 2010

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel **** (of 4)

David Finkel was embedded with the 2-16 on the outskirts of Bahgdad during Bush’s 2007 surge. He journals their work for one year. The troops...

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July 1, 2010

No One Would Listen by Harry Markopolos *** (of 4)

Markopolos is the guy who figured out Bernard Madoff. He did it by calculating Madoff’s the impossibility of his returns: nearly identical positive payoffs for...

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July 1, 2010

The Jewel Trader of Pegu by Jeffery Hantover ** (of 4)

A Sixteenth Century Jew from the Venetian ghetto travels to the east Indies to trade for Jewels so we can compare the lives of Jews...

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June 29, 2010

Hunting Eichmann by Neal Bascomb **** (of 4)

Adolph Eichmann, architect, planner, and executor of “The Final Solution” for the Jews escaped to Argentina at the end of the World War II. It...

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June 29, 2010

Parrot and Olivier in America *** (of 4)

At the end of the 18th Century, following the French Revolution, Olivier, a French aristocrat modeled on Alexis de Tocqueville arrives in America accompanied by...

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June 22, 2010

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon **** (of 4)

Hard to say if this book plays in Peoria, but Chabon prepares a perfect rendition of two genres: 1940s noir detective novels and Yiddish culture....

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June 22, 2010

The World to Come by Dara Horn *** (of 4)

On the plus side I learned a lot about Chagall. Dara Horn writes well. She channels the great Yiddish authors like Peretsky, Singer, Sholom Aleichem,...

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