Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Review:  Harlan Ellison’s Watching by Harlan Ellison

I have been going through some tough times lately and enduring situations that have left me stressed and depressed. In search of reading material to lift my spirits, I picked up this volume that I’d found recently in a used … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis

The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried has been a hot topic in the news recently. He is the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and in 2022 made Forbes’s list as one of the richest Americans. All that changed in late … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 7 Edited by Neil Clarke

The first thing that appealed to me about this substantial six hundred page collection of science fiction stories is that it is ensconced in a well-bound book with an easy to read font. Much as I enjoyed the late Gardner … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Being Michael Swanwick by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Although Zinos-Amaro is listed as the author of this book, it is in fact a collaborative effort. It consists of a series of interviews between prolific science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Swanwick and Zinos-Amaro. These interviews cover Swanwick’s stand-alone … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; Part Two

Like the stories in Lahiri’s earlier collections Interpreter of Maladies and Unaccustomed Earth, several of the tales in Roman Stories deal with cultural clashes: affluent foreigners who have chosen for various reasons to relocate to Rome, or laborers and domestic … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; Part One: Background

I have long appreciated Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing. I first came across it by accident. I was living in Greece, where my then-wife and I were raising our family; I often browsed for books at the library of the elite high … Continue reading

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Book Review:  Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini

This book appears to be and reads like a memoir, and in most ways it is; however, Parini explains in an afterword that the events, though true, took place fifty years ago, and though he had “a handful of notes, … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

This work is presented as a novel, but it is not really a novel in the conventional sense. The plot is very thin. The narrator takes a walking tour of Suffolk, a county in eastern England. He describes what he … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part Two

“The horror… The horror…” we hear Marlon Brando as Kurtz say at the end of the film Apocalypse Now. Such a somber chant would suit the mood of much of The Fatal Shore. It is almost unbelievable that humans could … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding by Robert Hughes – Part One

This is a massive, complex history about how the transportation of convicts from England to Australia gave birth to a new nation. It is also a devastatingly horrific story, so much so that I almost gave up reading it after … Continue reading

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