Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review: The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise by Pico Iyer

This book is well-written and takes us to fascinating places, but it is suffused with irony. Iyer tours locations that for one reason or another have been considered forms of paradise, but most of them are fraught with violence, and … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Thunder Song: Essays by Sasha LaPointe

Not long ago I read Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk By Sasha LaPointe. This essay collection is a continuation of the thoughts and emotions expressed in that volume, albeit arranged thematically instead of chronologically. It … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Cold Victory: A Novel by Karl Marlantes

Not long ago I attended an author reading at Third Place Books in Bothell, a suburb of North Seattle. Since I spend my days ensconced in my apartment doing remote work at my computer, I have been searching for opportunities … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow

Recently I took a bus to a bookstore in North Seattle to attend a reading of a new book by Cory Doctorow. It turned out to be not so much a reading as a discussion between Doctorow and Neal Stephenson, … Continue reading

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Thoughts on Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller

Recently I started to read a science fiction novel written back in the seventies. This was an acclaimed novel that had even won awards, and yet somehow I had never got around to it. I thought it would be a … Continue reading

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Book Review: Silence: In the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge

Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer, writer, and publisher who was the first person to complete the Three Poles Challenge, namely to hike to the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest. I read this book … Continue reading

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On Rereading Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey

Not long ago I did some research and wrote up a list of books on solitude. I thought that if I could absorb some of the viewpoints of other writers on the subject I might find some clues on how … Continue reading

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On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Four

John Varley’s novella “The Persistence of Vision” is a deeply troubling story; at least it troubles me. The narrator is an unemployed middle-aged man who, in the late 1980s, decides to hit the road rather than endure poverty in the … Continue reading

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On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Three

The novelette “Slow Sculpture” by Theodore Sturgeon has two characters: a woman with breast cancer and a disillusioned genius. They meet in a field where the man is conducting an experiment, and when she informs him of her plight he … Continue reading

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On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Two

And now we come to the novelette “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber, which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions. It is ostensibly a classic deal-with-the-devil fantasy, albeit unusually rich in descriptive detail and stylistic depth. … Continue reading

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