Either Jonathan Lethem has forgotten how to write or I have forgotten how to read. This book is so incredibly boring and bad it feels like a practical joke. It took me so long to read this book that when I started people still thought Hillary Clinton would be our next president. Even now I have only “finished” by speed-reading the last 80 pages with the result being a complete lack of comprehension. Not that I understood too much of what was happening when I […]
Practical Tactical Brilliance
Sarah Vowell’s books defy easy classification, which can make it annoying when people ask you about them. They are part history, part travelogue, part personal essay and yet that still does not seem to cover it. Her latest book, just out in paperback, concerns the relationship between the United States and the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman whose support was so key during the American Revolution. Vowell begins fifty years after the start of the war, when Lafayette returned to the United States for […]
Oh, Brother
This novel is a curious thing. Co-written by the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, the book focuses on the little-seen older, supposedly smarter brother of the great detective Sherlock Holmes. However, superfans of the Conan Doyle stories are unlikely to recognize the Mycroft Holmes presented here. Whereas in the stories Mycroft is middle-aged, portly, decidedly single, and constitutionally lazy. Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse instead conjure up a 23-year-old just embarking on a promising career in civil service, athletic, adventurous, and most surprisingly, engaged to be married and […]
From the Siege of Chicago to the Recent Past
An unsatisfied Midwestern suburban housewife abandons her husband and young son, only resurfacing decades later when she suddenly and inexplicably attacks a prospective presidential candidate. Suddenly drawn back into his mother’s orbit, her failed writer of a son finds himself torn between an opportunity to cash in on the notoriety and the chance to finally learn his mother’s secrets. Along the way, the narrative will connect a disparate crowd of characters including video-game playing hoarders, entitled college students, Norwegian evil spirits, bankers, violinists, soldiers, poets, […]
A Slight Trick of the Mind
At their best, Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels elegantly blend the two major genres of detective fiction. The rotund, intellectual Wolfe is a reasoner, a puzzler in the mold of Hercule Poirot or Peter Wimsey. His assistant, Archie Goodwin, is a wisecracking tough guy who can handle himself in any situation but has a weakness for pretty dames, a la the hardboiled detectives of writers like Hammett and Chandler, though with a much gentler disposition and a fondness for cold milk. The Silent Speaker, however, […]
And now you know the rest of the story…
Like a book-length Paul Harvey radio segment, Candice Millard’s new book provides some interesting and enlightening background on a well-known historical figure. Here, that’s Winston Churchill, the corpulent, heavy-drinking Prime Minister who inspired England to withstand the bombings and defeat Hitler. That admittedly simplistic overview aside, most of us probably aren’t familiar with Churchill’s life before WWII. Something had to propel him into the upper levels of the British government, and it turns out that it was his remarkable service in the Boer War. As […]
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