Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

What a great title. What an amazing image. And let me tell you something else, Colum McCann delivers in imagery, language, structure and sheer moments of heart wrenching beauty in telling a story that begins with the famous highwire tightrope walk that Philippe Petit did between the Twin Towers in New York City on August [...]

Maybe this book reminds me too much of the publishing industry whence I came, or maybe it reminded me of Ian McEwan’s style of writing and then failed to deliver or maybe I just didn’t like the main character Daniel Fielding but whatever it was this book didn’t do it for me in spite of [...]

“Learn how to die and you learn how to live.” This is the essential lesson Morrie Schwartz offers in a memoir of his final conversations between himself and his former student Mitch Albom. Mitch Albom becomes reacquainted with his former college sociology professor after seeing him interviewed on Nightline with Ted Koppel. Morrie has agreed [...]

I don’t often read business books or even non-fiction for that matter. But I am very interested in social technology from both a personal interest as well as a business point of view. I have worked in an environment where leadership ranges from complete disinterest in social technology to a panicked “oh my god, we [...]

It’s not very often that I read a book that I just don’t like very much.  The back cover of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is replete with admirable praise for the work using words like “awesome, breathtaking, dazzling” to describe the novel. While I can appreciate the narrative strength and the alternate history [...]

The Most Beautiful Book in the World by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is quite simply a delightful collection of 8 short stories each one focused on the life of a woman. Translated from French into English most of these stories take place in France. When I had first heard the title of the collection I had jokingly [...]

The Olympics seem to have robbed me of any reading momentum I had toward my impossible goal of reading 100 books this year. That plus the fact that I’m reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise which I’m slogging my way through like mud in a World War one trench. Where’s People magazine when [...]

Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is a wonderful study of human folly and caprice set amidst the studious manners and social hierarchy  of early 19th century small town English gentry.  If a novel that was written almost two hundred years ago sounds and feels like a foreign place (and believe me, it does, I mean how [...]

I don’t usually read historic fiction but I picked this up as a recommendation from my sister. Nancy Horan is a writer and journalist who spent most of her life in Oak Park, Illinois, where Frank Lloyd Wright had lived for many years and created a notable architectural legacy. As she became interested in Frank [...]

Dave’s turn: A Fraction of the Whole is narrated by Jasper Dean who tells us the story of  his overanalyzing, philosophical, paranoid father, Martin and his deceased master criminal uncle, Terry. As he tells us of the events that led to his father’s demise, he recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and unwanted adventures. The story [...]