Reviews of other people’s books
Ron Abell. Tap City. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1985. 274 pages. This is hardly a new release, but I just read this book for a class I might be teaching about gambling and media. And it’s a book I should have read a long time ago. Tap City is about a fictional Seven-Card Stud […]
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book reviewsJerome Tuccille. Gallo Be Thy Name: The Inside Story of How One Family Rose to Dominate the U.S. Wine Market. Beverly Hills: Phoenix Books, 2009. 288 pages. The American wine industry has seen tremendous change over the past eighty years. Driven (mostly) underground by Prohibition, winemakers faced several obstacles after repeal in 1933, chiefly American
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book reviewsTimothy Egan. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 352 pages. Forest fires are a perennial concern, particularly in the American West, as is government stewardship of public lands. This was no less true in 1910, when the Forest Service was young and the worst fire
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book reviewsJames David Robenalt. The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage during the Great War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 209. 400 pages. Warren G. Harding has been consistently ranked as one of the nation’s worst presidents, and doesn’t get points for personal ethics: after his death, there were numerous scandals in his administration, and he was notoriously
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book reviewsRyan Boudinot. Misconception. New York: Black Cat, 2009. 224 pages. Misconception is a novel in the form of a memoir with a twist: we get the same story from two perspectives. But this isn’t just a case of he said, she said: it’s a thought-provoking exploration of both memoir and memory. The memoir sections deal
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book reviewsKatherine Russell Rich. Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 384 pages. In 2001, editor and author Katherine Russell Rich decided to spend a year in India learning Hindi as a way of better understanding both India and herself. The literary result is Dreaming in Hindi, a memoir of
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book reviewsHoward J. Morris and Jenny Lee. Women Are Crazy, Men Are Stupid: The Simple Truth to a Complicated Relationship. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009. 240 pages. Relationship books are always popular, and since a flood of books by purported experts hasn’t stopped couples from breaking up, why not a book by a boyfriend/girlfriend pair
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book reviewsDonald McRae. The Last Trials of Clarence Darrow. New York: William Morrow, 2009. 422 pages. Clarence Darrow was one of the most polarizing figures of the early 20th century. He was at the forefront of several of the era’s most widely publicized trials, including the McNamara brothers’ 1912 trial for allegedly bombing the LA Times
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book reviewsJack Sheehan. Quiet Kingmaker of Las Vegas: E. Parry Thomas. Las Vegas: Stephens Press, 2009. 346 pages. Wow. That was my reaction to finding out that a biography of Parry Thomas was coming out. Thomas, the man who it said said “flipped the switch that turned on the lights in Las Vegas,” is easily one
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book reviewsJohn Buntin. L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. New York: Harmony Books, 2009. 409 pages. In this lengthy exposition of Los Angeles police and corruption, John Buntin examines the career of two Angelenos: Bill Parker, who became one of the LAPD’s most important–and controversial–chiefs, and Mickey Cohen, who occupied
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book reviewsTrisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile. I’d Trade My Husband for a Housekeeper: Loving Your Marriage after the Baby Carriage. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. 176 pages. It’s another Amazon Vine review, and another advice book. If you wonder why I review so many of these, its because there seem to be a lot of them
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book reviewsReview of Gerald F. Davis’s Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America,
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book reviewsReview of Greg Kot’s Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
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book reviewsRichmond Shreve. Lost River Anthology (Rites of Passage). Cape May, New Jersey: Cape Island Press, 2009. 146 pages. This is new ground for me: the first person I’ve had in a workshop or class who’s published a book. Richmond Shreve was in my creative non-fiction workshop a few years ago at the Winter Getaway, and
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book reviewsReview of Linda Himelstein’s The King of Vodka, a biography of Pyotor Smirnov.
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book reviewsMiranda Weiss. Tide, Feather, Snow: A Life in Alaska. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. 288 pages. This memoir is an exploration of how one woman abandoned the known for the unknown–in this case, south central Alaska. Weiss, who was born and raised in flat suburban Maryland, shucked off most of her preconceptions when she moved to
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book reviewsTarquin Hall. The Case of the Missing Servant. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. 310 pages. Vish “Chubby” Puri is the self-proclaimed finest private investigator in India, and in this, the first novel to feature him, the reader follows him as he cracks a case and, along the way, picks up some of his backstory.
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book reviewsHeather B. Armstrong. It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita. New York: Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009. 258 pages. There are many awful things about pregnancy, child birth, and infant care; many funny things, too. In It Sucked and Then I Cried, Heather Armstrong shares
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book reviewsMichael Franzese. I’ll Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse: Insider Tips from a Former Mob Boss. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. 152 pages. Books on how to success in business are plentiful and, I suspect, not that helpful. Most businesses probably don’t fail because of lack of motivation, but because they are undercapitalized. Time management
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book reviewsDennis Ogawa and John M. Blink, with Mike Gordon. California Hotel and Casino: Hawai’i’s Home Away from Home. Honolulu: Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i, 2008. 135 pages. Some casinos get all of the hype, while others fly below the radar but are consistently good performers. The California, in downtown Las Vegas, is definitely one of
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book reviews