Blogroll

Book Review: Starting from Scratch by Susan Gilbert-Collins

Preferring discretion over valor, I won’t refer to Starting from Scratch, the first novel from South Dakota native Susan Gilbert-Collins, as “chick lit.” So, how about “food lit”?

All right, while the book involves cooking from scratch and is interspersed with recipes, that also is probably a little too flip Gilbert-Collins, in fact, is looking […]

Book Review: Treason on the Airwaves by Judith Keene

Every once in a while, something reinforces just what vision those who wrote our Constitution had. The latest for me is Judith Keene’s Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War II. The title is self-explanatory but, as the book observes, of the three countries examined — Great Britain, Australia […]

Book Review: Red April by Santiago Roncagliolo

Scandinavian crime fiction is the hot new wave, a new niche of bestsellers combining mystery, thrillers and, occasionally, social themes and history. Despite the buzz around fiction from Northern Europe, Red April, the first book by Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo to be translated into English, can stand its own in any comparison.

Red April is […]

Book Review: This Day in Music by Neil Cossar

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 not be important, […]

Book Review: Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas

Scarlett 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, it’s a story […]