BookBrowse Editorial Review
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
by David Grann
(4/19/2017)
Grann's shock at discovering that the murder plots against the Osage might have gone far beyond those outlined in the trial – and his zeal for discovering the parties responsible for the dozens of unprosecuted murders – makes Killers of the Flower Moon more entertaining than a book about such a dire subject should be. He seems driven to amend the historical record, to prosecute, even from the distance of several generations of history, those responsible for the deaths of these now-forgott
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The New Odyssey: The Story of the Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis
by Patrick Kingsley
(3/8/2017)
Patrick Kingsley, author of The New Odyssey, tells a hell of a story. And in some ways, it's become the story of our times. There's no way Kingsley could have foreseen the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president when he began to report first-hand the plight of refugees from Syria, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa and throughout Europe, several years ago. But Trump's headline-making "Executive Order" restricting access to the United States for refugees from certain designated countries has giv
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
by Sebastian Junger
(2/1/2017)
Junger is content to diagnose the problem as he sees it, and other than a couple of feel-good examples of "giving back" from a World War II vet and a businessman who volunteered to cut his salary to keep paying his employees, the book offers no substantive solutions to the problem of the loss of tribalism in modern American culture. I wish he had looked more closely at countries outside of the U.S.—Italy, for example—where the idea of "family" still implies a more cohesive social bond. Still, th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle
(1/4/2017)
The book flap promises "an epic story of science, society, sex, and survival," and though one expects a bit of hyperbole from a publisher's marketing department, I couldn't help but wonder if the person writing that had read even a little of the novel, as The Terranauts is not in any way "epic." In fact, it's the opposite; it's a book of very small, closely observed moments. Regular readers of Boyle's fiction will recognize a few of his pet themes at work here: the consequences of thought
BookBrowse Editorial Review
City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
by Tyler Anbinder
(11/16/2016)
It would take a ridiculous number of pages to chronicle all the fascinating revelations embedded within Anbinder's brick of a book, a sprawling chronicle which lives up to its subtitle: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. For all its comprehensiveness, it remains a compelling – and at times touchingly personal – page-turner.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Hag-Seed: Hogarth Shakespeare
by Margaret Atwood
(10/19/2016)
There are many, many moments in Hag-Seed when the reader–who will get more out of the novel if she has seen or read the original play though it's not necessary to enjoy the book–will no doubt smile in wry recognition as Atwood appropriates Shakespeare's plot twists and characters for her contemporary story. That's one of the delights of Hag-Seed, the surreptitious recasting of a timeless work in our own time. But it's also one of the limitations. Hag-Seed is so dependent on
BookBrowse Editorial Review
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
by Ed Yong
(9/21/2016)
Yong brings to his celebration of these single-celled organisms the two qualities you want in any science writer: enthusiasm for his subject, and a metaphorical mind. Yong's zeal for his subject matter is, if you'll pardon me, infectious; and his gift for metaphor and analogy helps make palpable the mind-bending scope of the subject matter ... but for many readers, I suspect there might simply be a limit to their depth of fascination with this tiny, teeming legion of life. The book has no real p
BookBrowse Editorial Review
What We Become by Arturo Perez-Reverte
(8/3/2016)
In previous works like The Siege and The Club Dumas, the poignancy and emotional devastation was a by-product of the tightly knit story, while in this book the emotional revelations feel like an adjunct to the plot, tacked on to give the derring-do of the almost 500 pages an emotional heft. Within each of the time frames, there is intrigue aplenty. Jewel thieving in exotic and dangerous places among characters of the highest and lowest social stature offers an attractive palate for
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Mothering Sunday: A Romance
by Graham Swift
(6/22/2016)
Tucked within the 175 pages of this story are enough ideas hinted at for several seasons of episodic television, perhaps even a century-spanning epic, rooted in the realm of Upstairs-Downstairs-style domestic intrigue. Swift effectively immerses the reader in the life of a relatively powerless chambermaid in the early going, but the rapid unfolding of events in the latter half prevents the arc of Jane's life from being genuinely affecting.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley
(5/18/2016)
Fans of gothic horror and psychological thrillers will sense the presence of Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and even Poe, hovering over this book like guardian angels of darkness. But Hurley's narrative never provides the climatic jolt necessary to bring the otherworldly terrors fully into this world. His story offers a thoughtful, restrained, and literary denouement but most fans of gothic fiction will want a few doors noisily slammed, a few bell towers to crumble to dust, and maybe even a reani
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Sunny's Nights: Lost and Found at a Bar on the Edge of the World
by Tim Sultan
(4/20/2016)
Woven into the story of Sultan's enchantment with Sunny's (he eventually left his job at the Paris Review offices in Manhattan to work as a bartender at Sunny's once the place began opening more regularly) is the story of the rise, fall, and gentrification of Red Hook, Brooklyn, a once-seedy and crime-filled backlot to Manhattan's glittering cinemascape. There is an elegiac quality to the last few chapters as we watch a once truly unique bar become the newly christened destination for a crowd of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness
by Eli Sanders
(3/16/2016)
Every public official in a position to effect change in the mental health system ought to read this book and reflect deeply on its lessons. The rest of us can simply be moved to the tears summoned by the enduring love, tentative hope, and inconsolable pain of this searing human tragedy.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind
by A. C. Grayling
(3/2/2016)
Building a book-length argument around his contention that 'the seventeenth century is the moment when one world-view was displaced by another because the scientific displaced that of faith,' Grayling paints a picture of astronomers, mathematicians, medical doctors, and even alchemists often reaching conclusions that even they dearly hoped weren't true – because the answers meant opposing Christian doctrine, unwise if you wanted to keep your job, freedom or head...To my ear, though, the tone of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It ... Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
(2/3/2016)
Reading The Confidence Game might not make you immune to all scams and schemes, but it can at least offer you consolation if you ever find yourself wondering how a smart person such as yourself could have ever been so foolish.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Prisoner in Malta: A Christopher Marlowe Mystery
by Phillip DePoy
(1/20/2016)
Marlowe was a genuine man of mystery – and thus the perfect protagonist for a novel in which his shadowy associations, his ready wit, and his reputed swordsmanship are all called upon to save his own life and that of his beloved Queen of England. The first of a projected series of mystery novels featuring Marlowe, A Prisoner in Malta finds the dashing, romantic poet-playwright at his swashbuckling, wise-cracking best. And Edgar Award-winning author Phillip DePoy pulls out all the stops in the se
BookBrowse Editorial Review
And West Is West by Ron Childress
(11/18/2015)
Novels with a strong social message – much like vegan food – tend to come in two types: blatantly good for you with little attempt to dress up the flavor, or deceptively healthy, so tasty you don't even realize you are consuming something that's beneficial. The former tend to favor theme over plot or characterization. The latter category is harder to pull off, requiring embedding a social agenda within a compelling, organic story. These differing approaches kept coming to mind as I read Ron Chil
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Blue Guitar by John Banville
(11/4/2015)
Banville, a prolific and critically regarded Irish novelist whose previous works have won some of the most prestigious literary awards, is a mesmerizing prose stylist, and that's where he triumphs here. His looping, loopy sentences and his bracing and byzantine gift for turning a phrase provide The Blue Guitar with pretty much all of its satisfactions. Readers who have difficulty warming up to the somewhat cynical and even smug tone of the narrator might find the book a challenge, as the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
by Andrea Wulf
(10/21/2015)
With almost a hundred pages of explanatory notes and a bibliography extensive enough to comprise a near-lifetime of reading for even avid readers, The Invention of Nature is a serious book about a seriously important figure. Even if it never really transcends standard biography, Wulf certainly makes her case, establishing the singular significance of a man whose work was etched in stone but whose name was written on the shifting sands of time.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Wake: A Novel
by Paul Kingsnorth
(10/21/2015)
The Wake's patter brings us closer to the world of buccmaster and his contemporaries as they try to get their minds around the cataclysm of violent social upheaval and foreign domination. The odd spelling, the homophonic inversions, and the archaic vocabulary do take a wee bit of getting used to, but once the reader's eye and ear are acclimated to the language, one's mind is free to engage with the story, which is beautiful and dark.
The Wake is a splendid book, a sort of
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self
by Anil Ananthaswamy
(9/16/2015)
Ananthaswamy deserves credit for wading into this fraught and fecund arena. His book will strike many as a revelation. He presents a persuasive case that it's time to redefine the way we think of personhood, and that the paradigm of defining who we are by how we appear in the world no longer holds currency. Taken as a whole, the work that Ananthaswamy presents offers a prismatic portrait of humanity that focuses on the interior, not the exterior. The implications of this line of thinking are imm
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Three-Nine Line by David Freed
(9/16/2015)
The background of The Three-Nine Line is Vietnam, but I wish Freed had allowed it to creep a bit more into the foreground. As an award-winning journalist and feature writer, Freed has the trained eye, and ear, to make different places feel different.
Nonetheless, The Three-Nine Line is an efficient and satisfying standalone mystery too, with a dollop of political commentary about the Vietnam War to give it some heft and enough red herrings to keep most mystery fans hooked.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
by Rinker Buck
(8/12/2015)
Buck is a mildly diverting memoirist, and the chronicle of his personal adventure is not without its moments – though it does suffer from a certain monotony, as only so much narrative momentum can be generated through the recitation of the daily tasks of hitch the mules, steer the wagon, find a campsite, unhitch the mules, cook dinner, sleep under the stars. But his research into the teeming and turbulent existence of the original Oregon Trail pioneers is utterly riveting, from his discussions o
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Paradise Sky by Joe R. Lansdale
(7/22/2015)
Paradise Sky ticks off all the requisite checkmarks one expects to find in the genre: wide-open spaces, cattle stampedes, crooked poker games, whores with hearts of gold, bounty hunters, Indian raids, laconic cowpokes sitting around a campfire, shooting contests, racist posses, frontier preachers bringing God to the godless, and larger than life legends like Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. Amid the ebb and flow of all this frontier flotsam is a fairly simple story, set in motion by th
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession, and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship
by Robert Kurson
(6/17/2015)
Questions of exactness aside, Pirate Hunters is fascinating and suspenseful, a breathless story of shadowy figures and global intrigue, set against the backdrop of hostile oceans and an even more hostile rogues' gallery of ruthless, bloodthirsty pirates. I'd be surprised if the book doesn't strike a chord with most readers – and even more surprised if someone somewhere wasn't already at work turning it into a screenplay. As a potential cinematic blockbuster, Pirate Hunters seems li
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Black Snow by Paul Lynch
(6/3/2015)
Lynch, author of the critically well-regarded Red Sky In Morning, seems uninterested in escape – in fact he's doubling down on his Irishness by employing both a style, and a genre, that can't help but summon the spirit of the auld sod. Lynch's literary voice and cadence have very strong echoes of James Joyce (lines from Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist came regularly to my mind as I was reading). Is [its] style is too self-consciously literary for some readers? Pe
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures
by William DeBuys
(4/1/2015)
The Last Unicorn is an enthralling and sobering account of a modern-day quest with a mythic underpinning, a tale filled with grace and eloquence and despair. It deals movingly with a brink that is much less celestial but more consequential – for the creatures of the world, and for ourselves.