Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
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Greek Tragedies Volume 3
Review: Very good. Very, very good. 5 plays that are by the famous playwrights but are not the most popular and well known ones. Aeschylus – The Eumenides: Orestes on trial for matricide, 12 jurors of citizens, Athena as judge, Apollo for the defense. Sophocles – Philoctetes: Odysseus being a smartypants asshole like he was… Read more
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The Dead Zone
Review: Well that was the first Stephen King book I have read. Not that I was avoiding it, but when you read as much as I do, coupled with a 25 year beer break, some books and authors get missed. This was brilliant, amazing, beautifully crafted. Scary, sure. But more importantly it makes you feel… Read more
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Aku-Aku
Review: Easter Island! So remote and mysterious. So many questions, so much to learn. Thor Heyerdahl of Kon-Tiki raft fame in the 1950s led a scientific expedition to explore and dig on Easter Island and he found answers to many questions. Not all, but more importantly, he found adventure. Since this was written in 1957… Read more
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The Ramayana
Review: A long read, I started in March and read a short chapter a day, just like daily Bible readings. This is one of the ancient texts along with the likes of the Mahabarata and the Bhagavad Gita that brown people use to delude themselves into believing in nonsense. Like what white people do with… Read more
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The Enormous Room
Review: Powerful and deeply personal narrative of the author’s experience in a prison in France during the Great War. So many of the things, feelings and experiences I know intimately from my own jailhouse experience. The prose was so exquisite in places that I grabbed my highlighter to preserve them. Really great reading, I’m sad… Read more
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Dubliners
Review: This was fucking magnificent. Joyce brings to life fin de siècle Dublin like to LIFE. God I felt I was there. Is it modernist? Not in the same sense as Portrait of the Artist and certainly not as in Ulysses, but it deviates sharply from the rigid narrative structure that we are familiar with… Read more
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Alexander’s Bridge
Review: A five star performance again from Cather. Reminded me a lot of Henry James in The Ambassadors or the The Bostonians, men and women trying to be men and women but hidebound by manners and etiquette. This is the difference between good writing and great writing. The only criticism I would make is that… Read more
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Dave Brubeck: A Life in Time
Review: Finally got through this after an abortive fist attempt in 2020 (made it 50 pages). The prose is purple, just gushing descriptions of each song, each chord, each performance. Musicological language throughout with no purpose except to confuse and lose the non-musicologist reader. 2/3 of the way through he finally gets down to where… Read more
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Chasing New Horizons
Review: This is exactly how science needs to be communicated to the public. Lots of science for sure, but written so clearly that anyone can understand it easily. I learned so much. And I’m astonished this mission ever got off the drawing board. The number one concern, like all projects is: money, budgets, funding, costs.… Read more
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Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp
Review: What a little jewel this is. Just a lucky find on Amazon based on my previous browsing. From memory, without access to the books, this remarkable Polish officer delivered a series of erudite and passionate lectures on Proust and his great novel. While locked up in a Soviet P.O.W. camp that was deplorably bad… Read more