Category: Review
You need these reviews in your life.
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Steppenwolf
Review: First of all, this book was exquisite. Secondly, I am stoned right off my tits so I will continue this review tomorrow morning. … A tour de force. Art, metaphysics, music, Bohemia. All are present in this remarkable novel. This book made me want to: read more Hermann Hesse Overall rating: Readability: Plot: Other:… Read more
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Have Tux, Will Travel
Review: This one, out of all the Bob Hope Bios that I have read, ranks in the top. I can’t say “The Best” because each book has unique merits. This is an autobiography, written in mid-1950s (1954 I believe) when Hope was still at the top of his game. Top billing, top dollars, top of… Read more
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Shadows on the Rock
Review: Like all Willa Cather novels the prose is exquisite. Unlike most Willa Cather novels this was not set in the Great Plains. It was a novel of 17th century Quebec. Go Canada! Had to dust off my French skills as there were quite a few bits and pieces en français with no translation. Usually… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more
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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… Read more