History, some have said, is an accumulative science. Of necessity, it builds on what has come before, on what others have studied and written. Yet the building blocks are events, all of which — to the dismay of many students — are tied to particular dates. And while the dates themselves may [...]
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Tim August 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, classic rock, Culture, Music, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | One comment |
 Print This Post |  Email This PostScarlett Thomas likes to write about big ideas. She doesn’t deviate from that in her latest novel, Our Tragic Universe. In fact, the novel is built around portentous issues like immortality and whether we are all living in a simulated universe — and the storyless story. That’s right, the storyless story. Essentially, [...] Tim August 16th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | One comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostOpen any respectable book of quotations and there’s a 99.9 percent change you will see several from Henry David Thoreau. So, one might ask, is the world in need of a book consisting solely of selected quotes from Thoreau’s writing? Kenny Luck thought so, believing “we all could use a dose of Thoreau [...] Tim August 9th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, Henry David Thoreau, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | One comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostI recently read an an interesting comparison between two dominant strands of how we approach reading a book, particularly for reviewing — the journalistic approach and the literary criticism approach. While I don’t necessarily agree with all the observations, it does fairly define those approaches and, as this review demonstrates, I find myself largely [...] Tim August 2nd, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments |
Print This Post | Email This PostWhen it comes to Scouting, I’m a washout. Not only didn’t I make it past Cub Scouts, tying my shoes is about as advanced as my knot repertoire gets. Fortunately, David Scott and Brendan Murphy’s The Scouting Party: Pioneering and Preservation, Progressivism and Preparedness in the Making of the Boy Scouts of America [...] Tim July 28th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 3 comments |
Print This Post | Email This Post“I’m alive.” As much incantation as statement of fact, that simple phrase had plenty of meaning for American journalist Jere Van Dyk when he was taken captive by the Taliban in February 2008 and held for 45 days. In Captive: My Time as a Prisoner of the Taliban, it represents affirmation, a touch of [...] Tim July 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Afghanistan, Book Reviews, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostThere is an art to researching and writing biographies — at least good biographies. Although a work’s length and the amount of independent or original research may suggest how deeply a biographer delves into his subject, it certainly isn’t determinative of quality. At the same time, it is a field where the shorter [...] Tim July 19th, 2010 | Tags: biography, Book Reviews, Leo Tolstoy, nonfiction, Review Copy, Russian literature, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments |
Print This Post | Email This PostDavid Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is one of the most innovative books I’ve read. The problem it creates for him is that it sets a pretty high bar in the minds of many readers, myself included. So, let’s start with the fact that his latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, isn’t [...] Tim July 15th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, historical fiction | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |
Print This Post | Email This PostTitling a book may well be an art form in and of itself. Undoubtedly, the goal is to not simply to attract a reader but to convey something about the book itself. I have no idea how much study or analysis went into naming Dean King’s Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, [...] Tim July 12th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments |
Print This Post | Email This PostIf someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it’s the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war. South American writers, though, [...] Tim July 1st, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Notable Books Challenge, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |
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  The views expressed here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for my law partners, our associates, staff and clients or my family and friends. Not only should any opinions here not be attributed to them, chances are they probably don't agree with me.
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