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Currently ReadingRecently Read | As usual, I’m posting my favorite books of the year at year-end. Given that I tend to do a lot of reading over the holidays, I fear that if I do it too early there’s a chance I’ll miss THE book. That didn’t happen this year. In fact, I wasn’t really overwhelmed by anything this [...]            Tim December 31st, 2010 | Tags: Books, fiction, memoir, nonfiction, reading, Science, space, world literature | Category: A Reading Life | Comments are closed |  Print This Post |  Email This PostGood fortune — luck — manifests itself in a variety of ways. Frequently, just how lucky we are comes only with hindsight and even then we may not realize just what contributed to a serendipitous result. Yet the extent of a person’s fortune may well be a matter of perspective, much like the adage about [...] Tim November 16th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostThere are certain books you read during your life that stick with you. For me, one of those is one I first read while still in college, Mark Vonnegut’s The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity. First published in 1975 (and reissued in 2002), the book is a frank and compelling story of a young [...] Tim October 4th, 2010 | Tags: memoir, mental illness, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | One comment - (Comments are closed) | 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 surprise [...] Tim July 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Afghanistan, Book Reviews, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostGiven recent history, it would seem the term “ethnic cleansing” is of late 20th Century origin. Armenian Golgotha, Grigoris Balakian’s firsthand account of the Armenian genocide during World War I, disabuses any such notion. Balakian, an Armenian priest, notes several times that the Ottoman Empire embarked on an intentional campaign to “cleanse” itself of Armenians. [...] Tim April 20th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 2 comments - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostFor whatever reason, celebrity memoirs seem to sell better when they are tell-all tales. In fact, it seems the more salacious, the better. If that’s what intrigues you about such works, Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & The Shondells won’t fit the bill. If, though, you’re interested in [...] Tim February 12th, 2010 | Tags: Book Reviews, memoir, Music, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | 3 comments - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostThe numbers will finish off the end of the year book-related posts. I’ve been keeping a book diary since the beginning of 1976. This year I reached a record number of books read, 111. That figure is tempered by the reverse of what affected last year’s numbers. Just as my 2008 reading included a few [...] Tim January 1st, 2010 | Tags: bibliolust, biography, Books, history, memoir, nonfiction, world literature | Category: A Reading Life | One comment - (Comments are closed) | Print This Post | Email This PostGiven our history, Americans tend to think of political prisoners as those who actively oppose the political policies or government of their country. Yet in totalitarian societies even aesthetics are political so whether a person is a dissident is in the eye of the beholder. That’s what artist Er Tai Gao learned when he published [...] Tim October 19th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostEvery time period has its trappings. And while it may be impacted by its recency, it’s hard to imagine a historical period that carries more baggage than the 1960s. In her reflective quasi-memoir The Sixties, British author Jenny Diski sifts through some of the baggage but ultimately comes away dismayed and discouraged. At the outset, [...] Tim September 8th, 2009 | Tags: 1960s, Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, Review Copy | Category: Book Reviews | Comments are closed | Print This Post | Email This PostIt is the actions of the masses, not great men, that truly shape history, Leo Tolstoy argued in War and Peace. Support for that theory might be seen in Lijia Zhang’s “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China. Zhang’s book is a personal memoir, not a political one. That’s why it is [...] Tim May 5th, 2009 | Tags: Book Reviews, history, memoir, nonfiction, reading challenges, Review Copy, World Citizen Challenge | 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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