Blogroll

Book Review: A Force So Swift by Kevin Peraino

We’ve all watched with fascination those arrangements where hundreds or thousands of dominoes tumble one after the other to form an elaborate illustration. And who hasn’t somewhat envied the person who got to tip the first domino?

Such concepts aren’t limited to fun or entertainment. Images of dominoes falling were crucial to U.S. foreign policy […]

Book Review: Iraq + 100, edited by Hassan Blasim

Want to see how the marketing of a book is affected by who publishes it? Look at Iraq + 100, a collection of stories by 10 Iraqi authors imagining how their country would look 100 years after the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation by the United States. When originally released in the U.S. last December, […]

Book Review: Death of an Assassin by Ann Marie Ackerman

For the second time in a year, I’ve had book encounters with 19th century European assassins who eventually fled to the United States and began new lives under different names. The first was Sergei Degaev, who assassinated the chief of Tsar Nicholas’s security organization in 1883. Sixteen years later he would become a popular professor […]

Book Review: The Irrationalist by Andrew Pessin

Historical fiction is unique in several ways. In particular, while all fiction — at least good fiction — requires imagination and intelligence, historical fiction, according to bestselling author Alexander Chee, deals with “the plausibly hypothetical” and describes “what might have happened within what happened.” The constraints of real events, people and ways of life often […]

Book Review: The Trial of Prisoner 043 by Terry Jastrow

A popular bit of humor about Trump’s presidency is that George W. Bush is thrilled he’ll no longer be the worst president in U.S. history. Bush, in fact, was ranked the worst of our presidents by 61 percent of historians responding to a 2008 informal poll, in significant part because of the 2003 invasion of […]