Walter Lord wrote the definitive Titanic book, A Night to Remember, and wrote another heart-in-your-mouth thriller here. It’s not like I don’t know how either of those stories ended but Lord has a real gift for seeking out people you’d like to have a beer with in ordinary circumstances who are then thrown into extraordinary…
Read more Some characters take up residence in your imagination and just won’t leave.
An adventure novel, a history lesson, a love story, a cook book, and a whole lot of fun. Really well written, with no sentimentality mucking up the narrative. These are not pirates with hearts of gold (“TO THE BOTTOM!”), and Owen Wedgewood is such a whiner and so determinedly blind to what is going on…
McKibben calls this a fable, but I don’t know. What if people like Vern in states like Vermont all over the nation became accidental, nonviolent secessionists? What if they inspired their states’ equivalents of town halls to talk about and even vote on leaving the nation to be their own independent countries? If enough of…
Thomas Wolfe was wrong; you can go home again. Michael Perry comes home to New Auburn, Wisconsin, population 485, and reintegrates himself back into society by joining the local volunteer fire department. This is my third read by Perry and as always the armchair philosopher takes precedence in the narration. On his brothers, also volunteer…
James Comey is a Boy Scout and a true believer, and I don’t mean either of those judgements in a pejorative way. Let me repeat: He’s a Boy Scout in that Scout oath ‘duty-to-God-and-country’ way and a true believer in that Superman ‘truth-justice-and-the-American-way’ way. His explanation of the Martha Stewart case rings authentic in every…
I hope this is as close as I ever get to being shot at. Sebastian Junger’s War is that real, that immediate. Junger follows the 173rd Airborne’s Battle Company into the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Next to the definition of Hell on Earth in the dictionary? That’s the Korengal Valley. The weather (“Summer grinds on:…
The twelfth in Martin Limón’s Sueño and Bascom series, featuring two CID agents in South Korea in the early 80s, and I think his best by far. Three GI’s have gone missing, all of whom have abused Korean women, and Command sends Sueño and Bascom to find them. It’s a solid whodunnit, a window into…
Read more Mr. Kill and Officer Oh and — gulp–Dr. Bam are all back.
This book reminds me of Lonesome Dove, only Wyoming instead of Texas and now instead of then. Rancher Barnum McEban (he had a twin named Bailey who died in infancy) with lifelong friend Bennett Reilly goes in pursuit of Bennett’s wife, who left them both for a physicist in Denver. Women are always leaving guys…
Read more “It’s no goddamn wonder I live alone. I’m either working or in intensive care.”
Gail Collins’ America’s Women (400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines) reads like the women studies class I was never offered at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It should be required reading for every US high school student today. Listen to some of this stuff: The most famous runaway slave…was [Harriet Tubman]…In 1849, when…
Okay, let me give the consumer warning up front–do not attempt to read this book without a box of Kleenex on standby. There. Got it? Good. I saw Come From Away in NYC last month, the musical about the 38 planes that were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland on 9/11, and I immediately googled to see…
