Book Review: Managed by the Markets
Review of Gerald F. Davis’s Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America,
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Book Review: Ripped
Review of Greg Kot’s Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music
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book reviewsBook review: Lost River Anthology
Richmond 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 reviewsBook Review: The King of Vodka
Review of Linda Himelstein’s The King of Vodka, a biography of Pyotor Smirnov.
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book reviewsBook Review: Tide, Feather, Snow
Miranda 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 reviewsBook Review: The Case of the Missing Servant
Tarquin 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 reviewsBook Review: It Sucked and Then I Cried
Heather 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 reviewsBook Review: I’ll Make You an Offer You Can’t Refuse
Michael 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 reviewsBook Review: The Madness of March
Alan Jay Zaremba. The Madness of March: Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. 228 pages. Sports betting is one of the most popular, yet least studied, forms of gambling. Researchers have been trying to get inside the heads of slot players for years, and there’s been
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book reviewsBook Review: Decisions
Shaun Priest. Decisions. Lakeland, Florida: Small Dogma Publishing, 2008. 233 pages. Often, fiction does a better job of capturing reality than statistics and figures. Sometimes, there are no reliable numbers out there. Sports betting is a perfect example. There are not even solid estimates of the total amount bet illegally on sports each year because,
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book reviewsBook Review: The Towering World of Jimmy Choo
Lauren Goldstein Crowe and Sagra Maceira De Rosen. The Towering World of Jimmy Choo: A Glamorous Story of Power, Profits, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Shoe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. 215 pages. This is probably not the best book to read after American Rust. The transition from the gritty, downbeat novel to this superficial
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book reviewsBook Review: American Rust
Philipp Meyer. American Rust. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009. 343. This powerful novel is a case study in character development. Each chapter focuses on a single character. While the narrative remains in the 3rd person, the reader primarily sees the world through that character’s eyes for a few pages. This is an effective technique
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book reviewsBook Review: Parentonomics
Joshua Gans. Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2009. 240 pages. If there are two things that there is no shortage of opinions on, it’s parenting and economics. Yet books about both continue to be popular. So when one combines both topics, it’s of definite interest, at least to parents.
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book reviewsBook review: Crows and Cards
Joseph Helgerson. Crows & Cards. Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 2009. 352 pages, with notes for further reading and a glossary. I don’t usually read or review books for the 8-12 crowd, but I don’t see many books in that market about ante-bellum riverboat gamblers. That being said, I really enjoyed Crows & Cards. In Zeb Crabtree,
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book reviewsBook review: The Day Wall Street Exploded
Beverly Gage. The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of Wall Street in Its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 416 pages. There are many parallels between the terrorist attacks of September 16, 1920, and September 11, 2001. Both were aimed at New York’s financial center, came as the culmination of
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book reviewsBook Review: The Septembers of Shiraz
Dalia Sofer. The Septembers of Shiraz. New York: Ecco, 2007. 340 pages. The Septembers of Shiraz is a powerful novel that shows not only the brutality of an oppressive regime, but personal toll that government exacts, even on those who aren’t imprisoned. The novel begins with the arrest of Issac Amin, a Tehran gem dealer,
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book reviewsBook Review: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death
Charlie Huston. The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. New York,Ballantine Books, 2009. 319 pages. Wow. That’s my one word review of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. It’s one of the best, most distinct books I’ve read in a long time. I suppose the most cliched way to describe
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book reviewsBook Review: When March Went Mad
Seth Davis. When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball. New York: Times Books, 2009. 307 pages. Today, college basketball is big business, with massive TV contracts and incredible hype. During the annual NCAA tournament, college basketball mania reaches its apex with “March Madness.” Every red-blooded American fills out a bracket or ten and
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book reviewsBook Review: The Travel Book
The Travel Book: A Journey through Every Country in the World. Melbourne: Lonely Planet, 2008. 887 pages. This is a neat book, and an ambitious one. Is it possible to write a travel book that includes entries on every country (and many territories and sub-regions) in the world? Why, yes, it, say the Lonely Planet
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book reviewsBook review: Prize-Fighting
Arne K. Lang. Prize-Fighting: An American History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2008. 266 pages. In my all-too-brief, but then again way-too-long career in casino security, I always looked forward to fight weekends. Boxing fans, I discovered, were among the most interesting, intelligent, and historically-engaged casino patrons I had the pleasure of meeting. Folks
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