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Unlike some, I don’t think “blind faith” is redundant (although it was one hell of a short-lived “supergroup”). Granted, faith necessarily implies belief without the need for evidence. But “blind” suggests the faith exists without contemplation or introspection and perhaps even through willful ignorance. If the blindness is exposed to questioning, thought or analysis, it [...]            Tim April 8th, 2013 | Tags: Book Reviews, e-books, fiction, Religion | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment |  Print This Post |  Email This PostWhat if? To me, those two words are one of the keys to good science fiction. The writer looks at a current state of affairs in politics, society or science (or all three), asks “What if?” and their imagination creates the foundation for a story. It certainly seems like that’s the method Ted Kosmatka used [...] Tim March 28th, 2013 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy, sci-fi | Category: Book Reviews | Leave a comment | Print This Post | Email This PostBritish travel writer Fraser Harrison knows most travelogues are written with the writer’s home country in mind. He admits, though, that he didn’t necessarily aim Infinite West: Travels in South Dakota at British or other readers. He also is addressing “the people who inhabit the exotic land through which I journeyed.” Although writing as a [...] Tim December 27th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, nonfiction, Review Copy, South Dakota | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostLike perhaps most everyone, occasionally something strikes you that makes you think about those three or five people, dead or alive, you would invite to dinner if your could. Now anyone who reads this blog might well think that Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are on the “must invite” list. To be honest, though, I [...] Tim November 2nd, 2012 | Tags: biography, Book Reviews, Bruce Springsteen, Music, nonfiction, Review Copy, rock | Category: Book Reviews, Music | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostI’ve never investigated if publishers push autobiographies and memoirs to a particular time of year. All I know is they’ve dominated my reading lately. Four of the last five books I’ve read (and five of the last eight) are autobiographies/memoirs. (Who decides when a work crosses the line between autobiography and memoir?) All four [...] Tim October 17th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, Damien Echols, memoir, Music, Neil Young, Pete Townshend, reading, rock, Salman Rushdie | Category: A Reading Life, Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostThere is a place where the literary world and the gaming industry intersect. It’s the Nobel Prizes. Once again this year you can place bets on who is going to win the Literature Prize. Once again, Albanian author Ismail Kadare is considered a contender. As of this review, he’s one of three authors listed at [...] Tim September 11th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostAlmost of necessity, dystopian literature has its roots in concerns of the times in which it is written. It is an author envisioning a potential future in which something already existing or on the horizon heads in a bad direction. What author Jane Rogers recognizes in her award-winning The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the [...] Tim August 17th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, dystopian literature, fiction, Review Copy, sci-fi | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostFrancis Spufford’s Red Plenty may be the most fascinating book I’ve read in a long, long time. It’s the rare book where you think about the subject and have a hard time believing you are so involved with it. On the surface, Red Plenty is, for lack of a better term, a literary history of [...] Tim August 9th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, creative nonfiction, history, Soviet Union | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostAs David Hadju documents in his excellent examination of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s, The Ten-Cent Plague, adults saw the genre as contributing to juvenile delinquency and even subverting American values. This uproar, which included U.S. Senate hearings, led to the creation of the Comic Codes Authority in 1954. Yet even before the [...] Tim July 23rd, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, comic books, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostKafkaesque. It’s one of a handful of literary terms that is really overworked. But I challenge anyone to read Phillipe Claudel’s The Investigation without that word coming to mind. Ultimately, though, Claudel adds a surrealistic resolution that may baffle readers. Claudel’s book tells of the Investigator, sent to an unnamed city to investigate a series [...] Tim July 9th, 2012 | Tags: Book Reviews, fiction, Review Copy, world literature | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This Post |
      
 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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