I picked this up thinking it was the basis for the Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush movie, which I liked quite a bit. It’s not–it was actually written by a descendant of Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), whose interest in his grandfather (deceased 12 years when Mark was born) was piqued by a phone call from the movie’s producers. He began digging through his family’s papers, even going so far as to pull a box of archive material down from a cousin’s attic. Here he found carbon copies […]
The Phantom Menace of Presidential Memoirs
I think I did a good job while reading George W. Bush’s Decision Points in differentiating the man from his presidency. I was able to judge the book not by the character of its author, but by the character of its content, and I came away with an appreciation for the man that I had never had before. So I was interested to see how Bill Clinton’s voluminous memoir would impact my perceptions of the man and his presidency. A man, incidentally, whose accomplishments I […]
I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head
This book scared the pants off me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have chosen this to read when my latest bout of insomnia hit, but it certainly held me in its thrall until the very end. Susannah Cahalan was a bright young reporter for the New York Post, when she awoke one morning to find a mysterious bug bite on her arm. As it was during the height of the bed bug scare, she tore her place apart, cleaning and looking for signs of an infestation. She […]
All Fluff and No Substance Makes “Nicholson” a Dull Read
If nothing else, Marc Eliot’s biography of Jack Nicholson reminded me why I don’t typically read biographies of still living people when the subject has no involvement with the book. In relying exclusively on archival interviews and firsthand accounts from a handful of Nicholson’s friends Eliot has put together a superficial account of a man whose life is anything but superficial. Nicholson: A Biography recounts all of Jack’s life from his childhood to arriving in Hollywood up to 2013, yet when it was over I […]
The Shadow Catcher
This was the book that I almost didn’t read. I was at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention and of course going through the exhibition hall. This was my first convention and I didn’t know that on the last day of the convention, the vendors give out books like candy. So all I knew was that people were shouting out book titles and people were pushing and shoving to get them. Basically it was a bibliophile’s Mardi Gras. So I was at […]
Way More Bad Ass Than Rosie the Riveter
Don’t let the title fool you, it’s about the only titillating thing you’ll read in this book. I know that sounds like a slam on the book, but with a title like that, I was expecting the text to be a bit more reader accessible. I really can’t recommend this one unless you already have a good foundation of WWII history, especially the British intelligence front during the war. Between myriad acronyms and an intense expectation of European geography, it is not a book to […]
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