Book Review Monday

I can handle bad news, but not with every mouthful.

I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the mental image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, to the point that I started growing my own potatoes, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me…

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You’re grateful that no real terrorist thought of it first.

A police procedural featuring a murderer who chooses his victims by their street address. Almost everyone lives in a town with a Main Street. You said this wasn’t like any terrorism you had seen. That’s because we think of terrorism as something that happens in the cities. Nw York, Washington, DC, LA. This does something…

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After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

“In 1917,” Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams begins, Robert Grainier took part in an attempt on the life of a Chinese laborer caught, or anyway accused of, stealing from the company stores of the Spokane International Railway in the Idaho Panhandle. A man orphaned early and raised by relatives he leaves at the first opportunity to…

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