There are a lot of things going wrong in the world, but it is difficult to downplay the ecological crises we are currently witnessing. Repeated studies have been published describing a loss of biodiversity happening at a rate never seen before. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History describes the extinctions that are occurring around us in the context of five major extinctions in Earth’s history. Unlike so many books about environmental crises, Kolbert stays even-keeled, with a journalist’s approach to describing what, why, […]
Surprise! We don’t all believe the same thing
I’ve been struggling with writing a review of this book for a couple of weeks. Stephen Prothero is a religious studies professor. His thesis is that all religions are are different and that their differences matter. He refutes the bromide that all religions are separate paths to the same goal and therefore we should all just get along. Religions are distinctly different, beginning with the human problems they are trying to solve. For example Christians believe the problem is original sin, for Hindus the problem […]
An Unbelievable Story of Survival
Unbroken is one of those books that leaves you shaking your head at the atrocities that men have committed against men and women in war. There are moments in this book when I thought, how unlucky can this guy be, to go from one sadistic camp officer to another who is worse. The fact that any of the men interred in the prison camps described in this book is a testament to human resilience. The book is aptly subtitled. Unbroken is the life story of […]
Tick Tock
This book was written in 1946, and for some reason has received renewed attention. It is a short dark novel. Fearing was a poet for several years, but wrote pulp fiction, worked as a journalist and in public relations for money. He was also a serious alcoholic. As his alcoholism progressed he couldn’t hold on to money or his writing. When this book was made into a film he earned quite a bit of money, but lost it all quickly. I haven’t seen the movie, […]
In not Out of Africa
Alexandra Fuller had one hell of a childhood growing up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Zaire and even a couple of years in Malawi. Her family came from Britain originally, but the family viewed themselves as African. White African. Thus bringing with them all sorts of proper manners and plenty of prejudices. She grew up during the Zimbabwe’s civil war for independence. The book opens with this conversation that took place with her mother when Fuller was about six: Mum says, “Don’t come creeping into our room at […]
An Old Man Remembers the Blues
It’s been a long time since I read Walter Mosley’s great Easy Rawlins mysteries, set in post-war Los Angeles. Many years ago a friend gave me RL’s Dream, Mosley’s first foray outside the detective genre. I tucked the book on the shelf to read later. Almost twenty years later I found the book on the shelf last week. Curious to see what I’d missed, I plunged into the book that was described as being about the blues. RL’s Dream is set in 1990s New […]
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