The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra
THE UNEXPECTED INHERITANCE OF INSPECTOR CHOPRA AND SO MUCH MORE A “fun murder mystery” is not at all an oxymoron when applied to Vaseem Khan’s recent novel, The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra. While the murder itself is a serious occasion, the characters, their situations, and Khan’s tongue-in-cheek asides coalesce into a delicious potpourri of […]
Elizabeth of York
Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World Alison Weir, author of fourteen books on Medieval and Renaissance Britain, has now written about nearly every notable English queen from 1150 to 1600. This biography of Elizabeth of York, queen to the first Tudor king, Henry VII, is wonderfully conceived and elegantly written. I have […]
The Mare
THE MARE For those of us who know what it’s like to love horses, The Mare is so much more than another story about a horse and a girl who loves the horse. It is also the story of the mother who loves the girl, and another woman who longs to be a mother to […]
2015 Gift Books for the Guys in your Life
2015 Gift Books for the Guys in Your Life Taken from Neal Ferguson’s reviews for bookinwithsunny.com Bill Bryson’s One Summer, America, 1927 – Anchor Books In his sprightly but imminently insightful style, Bryson brings together a number of vivid stories that had their climaxes in the summer of 1927. How can a guy not be […]
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Recently, my niece in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Facebooked a message to me asking for a few recommendations of books she might like to read while vacationing in the warm climes of Mexico. I gave her a fiction title and then, because I hadn’t recommended it for several years, I told her that if she hadn’t […]
Trainwreck
Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . and Why Trainwrecks, Sady Doyle metaphorically muses, are women who have lost control of their own narratives. Whether their personal behaviors caused their degradation, or whether their downfalls derive solely from being shamed by others, trainwrecks signal something crucial to all other […]
The Paper Bag Princess
The Paperbag Princess, A twist to the knight and princess tale. The Paper Bag Princess by Robert N. Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko is a humorous fairytale that takes the idea of the knight in shining armor and gives it a modern twist. Elizabeth seems to be your normal everyday princess complete with a […]
The Clockwork Crow
The Clockwork Crow, first in a new series by Catherine Fisher. I feel on pretty sure ground when reviewing children’s picture books, but lacking a librarian’s insight and knowledge about middle readers, kids around the ages of nine to twelve, I often find myself out on a limb or on very thin ice. So, dear […]
Lafayette in the SOMEWHAT United States
Lafayette in the SOMEWHAT United States I’d venture a guess that few adults remember their 11th grade American history class as being particularly humorous. After all, escaping European religious persecution, taming a succession of wild frontiers, giving George III the heave-ho, building a new nation on a hill, acknowledging the greatness of the Founding Fathers and […]
Elephant Company
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Save Lives in World War II What do Elephants really want? In 1920, James Howard Williams decided to find out. He was twenty-three, an age when most well-educated, socially secure, middle-class Englishmen might well think about settling down to a professional […]
The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin may be having his day with noted biographies, but renowned revolutionary historian Gordon S. Wood has given us something else entirely. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin is a fresh look at how Ben Franklin became a universally recognized icon of Americanism. Wood takes us through Franklin’s process of change, from lowly son of […]
The Overstory
The Overstory A powerful novel of environmental concepts. During the decade before I retired, I often taught “Environmental Literature,” a capstone course for graduating seniors. Now, when I read a particularly thoughtful book about current land use issues, I wish I could talk with those eager students about how environmental concepts have advanced, or not, […]
Numbered Account
Numbered Account – Reich bifurcates his novel between the intricacies of Swiss banking and one fast-paced thriller. Christopher Reich has written what I would call a bifurcated novel. Numbered Account literally splits into two equal pieces. The first half is a cerebral portrayal of the intricacies of Swiss banking and the extremes to which Swiss […]
A Spy Among Friends
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal Grip this book or your e-reader and turn to page one. Buckle up. Expect turbulence. Prepare to be buffeted but riveted. It’s a hell of a ride. Over simplified but necessary background: MI5 and MI6 are two British intelligence agencies. MI5 is roughly equivalent to […]
The Martian
Self-reliant and self-deprecating, innovative and ironic, the intrepid main character of The Martian is stuck alone on Mars. One of six crew members on an American space mission from Houston, Mark Watney was injured in a freak accident, blown out of sight in a dust storm, and left behind by his fellow astronauts when they […]
The Witch of Lime Street, the spirit world revisited
The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World The “Roaring Twenties” have a reputation, deserved or not, for being a decade of excess in everything except the consumption of legal booze. Set in the 1920s, David Jaher’s The Witch of Lime Street chronicles excess on nearly every page. It is […]