I’ve been sitting on this review for a few days now because I felt that once I wrote, it, I would be forced to leave the book behind and move on to another project. I didn’t want to do that. While others have seen fit to compare Ms. Lee’s debut novel The Piano Teacher to [...]
Something I rarely do is read other reviews before writing my own. But with this book, I honestly felt as if I had little choice. And, before I begin, I should say that the reviews I read were ALL favorable. My voice, though, is not raised in praise; to the contrary, I want to shout [...]
A Mind at Peace is a movingly haunting symphony. Set to a backdrop of age-old Ottoman music and verse, it is the story of a country’s struggle to hold onto meaning and philosophic insight gained from centuries of traditions and customs while careening toward the comfort of wealth through acceptance of modern Western economic culture. [...]
Release Date: November 20, 2008
Some books are read in the comfort of a quiet calm. Where the Line Bleeds is not one of those books. Even though this is a book about love, devotion, caring and relationships within a family, a gnawing fear of looming disaster grips the reader from the first page; there’s an [...]
Publication Date: November 11, 2008
Simon Montefiore is a noted historian responsible for such award winning nonfiction works as Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Sashenka is his first foray into fiction, yet he is not straying from his roots. Beginning in St Petersburg in 1916, then skipping forward first to the [...]
Release Date - November 1, 2008
My review of this book is a balancing act. As I read the first section of the book—which amounts to half—I found myself very close to putting it down and going on to something else. But I have a hard and fast to rule I do my best to live [...]
Of James Salter, Richard Ford, writing in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Light Years, said, “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.”
It is said that when the late Joseph Fox, famed literary editor at Random House, was asked [...]
