In his own words
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Worlds That Weren’t
Review: 4 authors in fair Verona where we lay our scene… Sorry, had to be done. Harry Turtledove (noted Twitter anti-Trumper), S.M. Stirling, Mary Gentle, Walter Jon Williams. All What if? tales of alternate history. All excellent and all writers can either excel or really, not excel. Not a lot of middle ground in this…
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A Dirty Job
Review: 5 stars! Wanted to get that in there first, so there could be no confusion. From the first page this was excellent. Funny, really funny. Like laughing about it when you’re not reading it and people stare at you. Despite the humor there is a lot of genuine human emotion which can be very…
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The Gilded Dinosaur
Review: Yawn. Made it 97 dense pages and bailed. The story of two rival paleontologists in the old west racing around Arizona and Colorado trying to snag the best fossils before the other guy. The detail about the campfires and the letters was exhaustive. Way too much. This could be a deep dive article in…
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Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Review: Brilliant. Amazing. Enlightening. A humorous at times, serious at times, and scientific at times look at a never discussed subject: what happens to cadavers. From helping surgeons learn more and better techniques to helping develop safer cars, the extraordinary “lives” that cadavers lead help the living immeasurably. Religion poisons everything. Some of the best…
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Treasury of Greek Mythology
Review: Lavish and beautiful, and that’s just the illustrations. This book was meant to delight its readers and that is exactly what it did. Written for everyone but with the younger reader in mind, which means it is uncluttered and easy to absorb. [Prophetic! – ed.] Man I hate writing things out by hand. I’m…
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The Anarchy
Review: A vivid and richly detailed story of the birth, rise, and decline of the East India Company. A fascinating “like you were there” history of one of the world’s first joint stock corporations and how it grew to control an empire bigger than any of its founders could have ever imagined. The exploitation of…
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No More Parades
Review: The second book in what they call the tetralogy of Parade’s End. Here we find the admirable protagonist Tietjens as an officer at a starting off camp in the Great War. It’s not an easy book to read or to understand. It’s literature for certain and woth the effort to read it. But I…
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The Blind Assassin
Review: This was my very first experience reading Margaret Atwood. There’s a reason she won the Booker Prize for this. Prose is elegant and shit-filthy by turns. I love reading Canadian books because I can identify with the places, the seasons, the attitudes. The point of these reviews is to provide a critique, for whomever…
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Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Review: Yeesh, what a clunker. Like the Zeller’s burger, it tastes way better in your nostalgic imagination. This was great as a movie. As a book (adapted from the Dazzling New Film!), it creaked and galumphed along, borne gaily along on a tide of racism and archaic notions of cultural identity. Even as bad as…
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History of the World in 100 Objects
Review: Finally found a copy of this (in the UK, naturally!) and what a joy to read. This was of course originally a series of 100 podcasts from BBC Radio 4. First broadcast in 2010, I remember listening to each episode on my first iPod – a 2GB shuffle. This is the story – our…