Author Archives: John Walters

Book Review: A Fiction of the Past: The Sixties in American History by Dominick Cavallo

I came into the sixties indirectly – that is, in the backwash of the early seventies. Gone were the Diggers, the SDS, Woodstock, the Summer of Love, the whole Flower Power scene, and other manifestations that made the era so … Continue reading

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A Second Look: World Without Pain: The Story of a Search

In the 1970s, after the Altamont Rock Festival, the Manson Family cult murders, and the fiasco of the Vietnam War many young people, disillusioned by the hippy movement, began to leave their homelands and travel to the far places of … Continue reading

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Book Review: Artemis by Andy Weir

Disclaimer time: I haven’t read The Martian, the book that made Andy Weir famous. I’ve seen the movie a few times, though, and that will have to suffice to allow me to make comparisons between that story and this, because … Continue reading

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Book Review: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

I have wanted to read this book for some time, so I put in a reservation at the library and I was about two hundredth in line. It would have taken many months. Then it became available as part of … Continue reading

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What a Long Strange Year It’s Been: A Personal Look at 2017

Like many of you, I have been aghast at America’s convoluted, complex, and dysfunctional political situation this past year, but I’m not going to comment on that. Early on in this blog’s history, I decided to stay far away from … Continue reading

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A Second Look: Love Children: A Novel

It is the mid-1970s.  The Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music Festival have come and gone.  Into the atmosphere of cynicism and doubt following the wild optimism of the youth revolution the Love Children, raised from birth by benevolent … Continue reading

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Book Review: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

I have to blurt out right from the start that this is the best novel I have read in a long time. How I came to read it was unusual. I had started another novel, a highly acclaimed novel in … Continue reading

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Book Review: Chief Seattle and the Town That Took His Name: The Change of Worlds for the Native People and Settlers on Puget Sound by David M. Buerge

When I take my daily walks in my neighborhood in north Seattle, I marvel that so much of the indigenous foliage has survived the carpeting-over by houses, shops, streets, and sidewalks. Majestic evergreens tower high over the tallest buildings, and … Continue reading

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A Second Look: The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories

High in the Himalayas a young woman receives an extraordinary gift.  Beneath the streets of Calcutta a man discovers a terrifying presence.  In a palace full of sybaritic pleasures a demigod incurs terrible retribution.  On a far desert planet teeming … Continue reading

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Book Review: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

In my search for new nonfiction books to read, I perused recent awards lists and came across this title. It surprised me that a book on surfing should have won a Pulitzer Prize, but as I read brief descriptions of … Continue reading

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