Category: Book Reviews

June 17, 2010

Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth W. Farnea ** (of 4)

In the late 1950’s Elizabeth Farnea’s new husband traveled to a small rural village in southern Iraq to do graduate research on an irrigation project....

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June 17, 2010

Grey Seas Under, by Farley Mowat ** (of 4)

The book is a biography of a tough iron-clad tugboat that makes its way from the coast of Newfoundland into the deadly winter storms of...

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June 17, 2010

Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester *** (of 4)

One of Manchester’s best. A memoir about his role in WWII marines in Pacific theater.

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June 17, 2010

Going with the Grain by Susan Seligson ** (of 4)

Eight travel stories about bread in Morocco, Jordan, Brooklyn, the Wonder Bread factory in Massachusetts and so forth. Seligson writes well enough. Her stories are...

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June 17, 2010

Getting Stoned with Savages by J. Maarten Troost *** (of 4)

In the style of Bill Bryson, self-effacing and laugh aloud funny, Troost describes his adventures on the Pacific isles of Vanuatu and Fiji. He leaves...

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June 17, 2010

Game Time by Roger Angell *** (of 4)

A collection of Angell’s best stories about baseball. Vintage Angell. He’s one of the greatest writers in the English language on any topic.

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June 17, 2010

The Founding Fish by John McPhee ** (of 4)

Classic late McPhee. Dense, exquisitely written, and plotless.

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June 17, 2010

1491 by Charles C. Mann *** (of 4)

Mann skewers nearly every myth I learned in K- College about Native Americans. They didn’t walk across the Bering Strait to settle the Americas. They’ve...

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June 17, 2010

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins **** (of 4)

Filkins has chutzpah. He has been reporting on the war in Iraq since the days before Al Qaeda ever goaded the Bush administration into attacking...

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June 17, 2010

Fire by Sebastian Junger *** (of 4)

This is a series of reports from the late 90s, magazine articles originally, about dangerous jobs and dangerous people: smokejumpers, jihadists in Afghanistan, blood thirsty...

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