Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review:  1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin

This entertaining history of the 1929 stock market crash reads like a thriller, even though as readers we know how it is all going to turn out. Sorkin breathes life into his characters; he makes us get caught up in … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes

This is the third book I have read by Richard Holmes, the others being The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science and Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. In both these tomes … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life by Leonard Mlodinow

This is an unusual book. Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist known for his groundbreaking work in, among other things, quantum electrodynamics and nanotechnology; he assisted with the development of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project and was … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling by Frank Miller

Frank Miller is primarily known as a graphic artist; since the 1970s he has worked in the DC and Marvel universes with such characters as Daredevil, Elektra, and Batman as The Dark Knight. His original titles include Ronin, 300, and … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words by Sophia Smith Galer

I cannot say, despite my decades of worldwide wanderings, that I have become any sort of language virtuoso. I would pick up the local languages the best I could while passing through, and due to prolonged stays in the appropriate … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an Autobiography by J.G. Ballard

I first became acquainted with the stories of J.G. Ballard in the early 1970s during my first infatuation with science fiction, specifically with the cutting-edge literary work referred to as the New Wave. Back then, his shorter works appeared mainly … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

I don’t know how this book managed to avoid my radar for all this time. After all, I am a big fan of the surrealistic fantasies of Jorge Luis Borges. In fact, Invisible Cities reminds me of some of the … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

Into Thin Air is a first-person account of a climbing expedition that went horrifically wrong. Krakauer, a journalist, was hired by Outside, an adventure magazine, to join a mountain climbing team whose purpose was to attain the summit of Mount … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

I picked up this book from the library a few years ago but returned it without reading it after realizing that Lahiri had written it in Italian but someone else then translated it into English. I decided to give it … Continue reading →

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Book Review:  Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time by Mark Adams

This book is not simply a travelogue set in Peru. It is an attempt to follow in the footsteps of the legendary explorer Hiram Bingham III, who supposedly discovered Machu Picchu in 1911. In his literary quest, Adams alternates between … Continue reading →

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