Current Book Reviews
FullReviews Index
Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter 5)
Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix is the fifth book in the series, and the most anticipated after the last cliffhanger ending. The fourth book marked a turning point, as Lord Voldemort (think Darth Vader meets Hitler) returned to human form to rebuild his army and start a second uprise to power, determined to let only pure blood wizards remain. Compared to the first three books, the fourth was much darker, more compelling, and only led to the greatness of book five.
The Pleasure of My Company
Daniel Pecan resides in his Santa Monica apartment, living much of his life as a bystander: He watches from his window as the world goes by, and his only relationships seem to be with people who barely know he exists. He passes the time idly filling out contest applications, counting ceiling tiles, and estimating the wattage of light bulbs.
Pattern Recognition
Cayce Pollard inhabits a world in which disembodied voices speak suggestively to each other in boutique elevators and data is encrypted invisibly within graphical content. Is Pattern Recognition yet another William Gibsonian info-trash cluttered cyber-realm? No. Cayce Pollard's world is our own with its present-day setting marking a significant departure for Cyberpunk Godfather, William Gibson.
Naked: Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth
Naked brings together thirty-one pieces by writers who examine and challenge the way people live with our environment. Edward Abbey's newly published correspondence rants against passive nonresistance. Stacey Richter mines the questionable legacy of John James Audubon, while erudite wanderer Bruce Chatwin makes a case for nomadism. Lydia Millet rails against "environmental pornography" and T. C. Boyle suggests we are all wild at heart, and not particularly well-groomed.
Inkheart
One night Meggie's father, Mo, reads aloud from a book called INKHEART, and an evil ruler named Capricorn escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. From Cornelia Funke, the author of the international best-selling novel THE THIEF LORD, comes another thrilling and magical adventure about books themselves and the imagination they inspire.
Eragon (Inheritance, Book 1)
When Eragon finds a polished blue stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon's simple life is shattered, and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic, and power. So begins Book 1 of Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Trilogy.
The Secret Life of Bees
In "The Secret Life of Bees," Sue Monk Kidd wraps a coming-of-age tale around a search for one's mother, plunks it down into the racially-charged South Carolina of the 1960s and sets it all alight with a dose of feminine spirituality. . It is an inspirational feminist tale with strong female characters.
Under the Banner of Heaven
Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air was a narrative tour de force chronicling the disastrous 1996 Everest expeditions, and should be considered a classic of modern journalism. Measured against this awesome standard, Under the Banner of Heaven, a tour of mainstream Mormonism and its fundamentalist offspring, is a failure. It is a lucid and sometimes compulsively readable failure, but it lacks the narrative drive and cohesive perspective of Into Thin Air.
Discovering Joan Didion
Upon reading only a couple of the essays collected in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," I knew two things immediately: her voice is one of an unbiased observer who doesn't judge, but merely collects people, places, events, information and structures them so that they are compellingly readable. Secondly, Joan Did ion's prose is some of the most artfully arranged I have ever read.
Working Fire: The Making of an Accidental Fireman
Zac Unger didn't feel like much of a firefighter at first. His fellow recruits seemed to have planned for the job all their lives; he was an Ivy League grad responding to a help-wanted ad. He couldn't keep his boots shined, and he looked horrible in his uniform. Working Fire is the story of how Zac Unger came to feel at home among this close-knit tribe, came to master his work's demands, and came to know what it is to see the city of Oakland through a firefighter's eyes.
Bringing Down the House
Backed by anonymous investors and armed only with their audacity and their intellect, a team of MIT math students cleaned Vegas out of more than $3 million in a couple of years. They used published card-counting techniques and worked in teams like secret agents. They ate statistics for breakfast, and they raked in millions of dollars before getting caught. They were a dream team. So why did they get caught?
True Notebooks
When Mark Salzman is invited to visit a writing class at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeles’s most violent teenage offenders, he scrambles for a polite reason to decline. He goes—expecting the worst—and is so astonished by what he finds that he becomes a teacher there himself. True Notebooks is an account of Salzman’s first years teaching at Central. Through it, we come to know his students as he did: in their own words.
I Sleep At Red Lights
“I Sleep at Red Lights” is Bruce Stockler’s account of the maelstrom that ensues when a couple become the parents of triplets plus one. It recounts the transformations a father undergoes beginning with the revelation that his family is about to triple in size and traversing through an unbearable pregnancy into the surreal and sleepless wonderland that is parenting multiple-birth infants.
Mr. Paradise
Roommates Kelly and Chloe are enjoying their lives and their downtown Detroit loft just fine. Kelly is a Victoria's Secret catalog model. Chloe is an escort, until she decides to ditch her varied clientele in favor of a steady gig as girlfriend to eighty-four-year-old retired lawyer Tony Paradiso, a.k.a. Mr. Paradise... Mr. Paradise is Elmore Leonard at home in Detroit and sharper than ever.
Quicksilver, The Baroque Cycle Volume I
Volume I of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, is here. A monumental literary feat that follows the author's critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Cryptonomicon, it is history, adventure, science, truth, invention, sex, absurdity, piracy, madness, death, and alchemy. It sweeps across continents and decades with the power of a roaring tornado, upending kings, armies, religious beliefs, and all expectations.
The Confusion, The Baroque Cycle Volume II
The Confusion, the second book of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy does not disappoint as he picks up his characters where he abruptly dropped them at the end of Quicksilver. The year is 1689 and Jack Shaftoe was last seen captive aboard a slave vessel, Eliza finds herself the center of political intrigue, and Daniel Waterhouse lies with uncertain fate atop an operating table. Join Stephenson amidst a vast and intricate historical backdrop in Volume two of The Baroque Cycle.
Global Village Idiot: Dubya, Dunces, and One Last Word Before You Vote
John O’Farrell is a columnist with the Guardian as well as a writer for the TV show Spitting Image and a joke writer for Tony Blair (not the one that is a fake puppet on Spitting image, but the one that is the real puppet of George W. Bush). Global Village Idiot is a reprinting of many of his Guardian columns over the period of time beginning with George W. Bush on the campaign trail and ending on the desert trails leading to Baghdad.
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
Chuck Klosterman, author of "Fargo Rock City," struggles to maintain a consistent level of quality throughout "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," his recent collection of essays that range topically from the music industry to "The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise's Shattered, Troll-like Face."
She Plays with the Darkness
In a remote mountain village, the beautiful Dikosha lives for dancing and for song. Her twin brother, Radisene, works in the lowland capital of Maseru, struggling amid political upheaval to find a life for himself away from the hills. As the years pass, Radisene's fortunes rise and fall in the city, while Dikosha remains in the village, never leaving and never aging. And through it all, the community watches, comments, and passes judgment.
Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
For the first time since his own classic Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken trains his subversive wit directly on the contemporary political scene. Now, the "master of political humor" (Washington Times) destroys the myth of liberal bias in the media, and exposes how the Right shamelessly tries to deceive the rest of us. Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them)is sure to become the most talked about book of political humor in 2003 and beyond.
Fishing the Sloe-Black River
Fishing the Sloe-Black River, the short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane.
The Turk
Part historical detective story, part biography, Tom Standage's book The Turk relates the saga of the machine's remarkable and checkered career against the backdrop of the industrial revolution, as mechanical technology opened up dramatic new possibilities and the relationship between people and machines was being redefined. Today, in the midst of the computer age, it has assumed a new significance, as scientists and philosophers continue to debate the possibility of machine intelligence.
Eastern Standard Tribe
Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels. Or perhaps not. Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, is nothing if not misleading.
The Bride Stripped Bare
In writing The Bride Stripped Bare, the author decided to remain anonymous so she would feel absolutely free to explore a woman's inner world. As she writes in her afterword, "That doesn't mean this book is a memoir; it's many things to me, fiction and nonfiction, fantasy and fact, a quilt pieced together not only from my stories but those of my friends." Coolly impassioned, The Bride Stripped Bare tells startling truths about love and sex.
Villa Incognito
On one level, Tom Robbins' Villa Incognito is a book about identity, masquerade and disguise--about the false mustache of the world - but neither the mists of Laos nor the smog of Bangkok, neither the overcast of Seattle nor the fog of San Francisco, neither the murk of the intelligence community nor the mummery of the circus can obscure the linguistic phosphor that illuminates the pages of Villa Incognito.