MORE PAST BOOK REVIEWS
Short Stories, Epic Tales & Engrossing Novels | | | 
| What Every American Should Know About the Rest of the World: Your Guide to Today's Hot Spots, Hot Shots, and Incendiary Issues By M.L. Rossi
Don't you want to know why everyone hates us? An acute awareness finally forced upon Americans on 9/11, this book is a concise and eloquent collection of facts that everyone alive on the planet should know. Rossi thoroughly outlines the histories and conflicts between the U.S. and the countries that have impacted us in the past and those that will impact us in the future, and he does so in a decidedly readable way, without pomp or condescension. It should be given out for free on the streets and forced on teens throughout our high schools. Read it! You owe it to yourself, your country, your children and your well-informed dinner companions. Click on the image to buy now! | | |
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The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of The World By Michael Pollan In 1637, one Dutchman paid as much for a single tulip bulb as the going price of a townhouse in Amsterdam. Three and a half centuries later, Amsterdam is once again the mecca for people who care passionately about one particular plant - though this time the obsessions revolve around the intoxicating effects of marijuana rather than the visual beauty of the tulip. How could flowers, of all things, become such objects of desire that they can drive men to financial ruin? In Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that the answer lies at the heart of the intimately reciprocal relationship between people and plants. In telling the stories of four familiar plant species that are deeply woven into the fabric of our lives, Pollan illustrates how they evolved to satisfy humankind's most basic yearnings - and by doing so made themselves indispensable. Click on the image to buy now!
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The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living By Dalai Lama Have you ever wondered what it would be like to sit down with the Dalai Lama and really press him about life's persistent questions? Why are so many people unhappy? How can I escape loneliness? How can we reduce conflict? Is romantic love true love? Why do we suffer? How should we deal with unfairness and anger? How do you handle the death of a loved one? These are the conundrums that psychiatrist Howard Cutler poses to the Dalai Lama during an extended period of interviews in The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. In the words of H.H. the Dalai Lama, "Whether one believes in religion or not,
whether one believes in this religion or that religion, the very purpose of our life is happiness, the very motion of our life is towards happiness." Click on the image to buy now! |
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All Men Are Mortal By Simone De Beauvoir What is the point of falling in love or making a friendship, only to watch people you care about grow old and die? What is the point in trying to change things when their essence remains the same throughout time? It is through this immortal life that Simone de Beauvoir explores what it means to be human, what it means to exist, and if one can ever really, truly be immortal. The book is about a man, Fosca, telling the story of his life, which started six centuries ago. Fosca is immortal and has lived through many important historical episodes, such as revolutions and conflict, and he has also loved a number of women in his life. However, as this book clearly shows, without death, life has no meaning. Click on the image to buy now! |
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The Dew Breaker By Edwidge Danticat In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat weaves a brilliant and haunting work of fiction that explores the world of a "dew breaker" - a torturer - a man whose brutal
crimes in the country of his birth lie hidden beneath his new life in America. (A dew breaker, we learn, is a government functionary who arrives in the early morning to arrest someone or to burn down a house, breaking the dew on the grass that he crosses.) As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around the protagonist: his devoted wife and rebellious daughter; sometimes unsuspecting neighbors, tenants and clients; and even some of his victims. The Dew Breaker is a book of interconnected lives - a book of love, remorse and hope; of personal
and political rebellions and of the compromises we often make in order to move beyond the most intimate brushes and struggles with history. Click on the image to buy now! |
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The Samurai's Garden By Gail Tsukiyama The Samurai's Garden is a soothing, hypnotic, heartbreaking and poignant book. Gail
Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, who is not only a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener but also a samurai of the soul. He is a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world while Stephen becomes his noble student. The book explores cultural differences and similarities as it portrays the development of friendship and respect by depicting the characters as humans who try to be good but not perfect - as people accepting their circumstances and finding inner peace despite their flaws and mistakes. Click on the image to buy now! |
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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
By Alexander McCall Smith
Precious Ramotswe is not only a remarkable creation of this lovely book, but she is an unconventional, unmarried Botswana woman who spends the money she got from selling her late father's cattle to set up her own private eye agency. To be more accurate, the colorful sign reads, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency." The solutions she comes up with, whether
in the case of the clinic doctor with two quite different personalities (depending on the day of the week), or the man who joined a Christian sect and seemingly vanished, or the kidnapped boy whose bones may or may not be those in a witch doctor's magic kit, are all sensible, logical and satisfying. Alexander McCall Smith's gently ironic tone is full of good humor toward his lively, intelligent heroine and toward her fellow Africans, who live their lives with dignity and with cautious acceptance of the confusions to which the world submits them. Click on the image to buy now!
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