BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Voyeur’s Motel’
This is a weird book about weird people doing weird things, and I wouldn’t have put it down if the house were on fire.
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BOOK REVIEW: ‘Clean House: Exposing our Government’s Secrets and Lies’
If you have any doubt that our current federal government is so treacherously corrupt that our country is teetering at a tipping point where survival of the liberty of the American people is at peril, read “Clean House” by Tom Fitton.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Girl: My Childhood and the Second World War’
Reading this searing account of a hydra-headedly horrible childhood endured by Polish-born Israeli children’s writer Alona Frankel reminds one just how complex that loaded term “Holocaust survivor” is. Mrs. Frankel’s devastatingly frank autobiography has been compared to “The Diary of Anne Frank” and to the writings of Primo Levi, but, of course, they both were inmates of Auschwitz, a fate avoided by the eponymous “Girl.”
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Imperfect Union’
The ghastliness of Gettysburg, the culminating battle of the Civil War, has been reduced to the ultimate horror of a 19-year-old soldier dying in a “puddle of his own blood” in this stark and wrenching war book.
Aviation combat in World War I
Early in the history of military aviation, the Dutch aircraft designer and pilot Anthony Fokker famously remarked, “Every man who went aloft was marked for death, sooner or later, once his wheels had left the ground.”
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Public Library and Other Stories’
While the number of libraries is gradually shrinking, Ali Smith preserves these literary sanctuaries in her short story collection, “Public Library and Other Stories,” with shifts between past and present, resembling the mechanics of our own memory.
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Ten Restaurants that Changed America’
In these days of ever-increasing specialization in the academic world, with its micro-courses and all too narrow focus, it is a delightful surprise to encounter someone like Yale’s professor Paul Freedman.
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BOOK REVIEW: 'Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's Chinatown'
Historian Scott D. Seligman offers an interesting and true tale about the Chinese gang wars in New York City from the 1890s through the 1930s. The 30-year-long gang wars resulted in many brutal murders, injustice, tragedy and rampant crime and corruption.
BOOK REVIEW: 'Avid Reader: A Life'
Reading this vibrant memoir by New York publishing legend and The New Yorker magazine editor Robert Gottlieb left me with two main conclusions: one surprising, the other anything but.
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Pigeon Tunnel'
John le Carre has led an enviable life roaming the secret world of spies and becoming famous by writing about it all.
BOOK REVIEW: 'Dagger 22: U.S. Marine Corps Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan'
Michael Golembesky was one of those idealistic young Americans who enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 to fight the war on terror.
BOOK REVIEW: 'Choosing War: Presidential Decisions in the Maine, Lusitania, and Panay Incidents'
While we all "Remember the Maine," which touched off the Spanish-American War, and many of us recall that the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania was one of the proximate causes of us entering World War I, few if any of us know much about the Japanese bombing of the U.S. Navy gunboat Panay in 1937, which could have nudged us into war with Japan four years early, but didn't.
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe'
What a difference 17 years make. Sitting in the cocktail lounge of Paris' elegant Prince de Galles hotel in June of 1999 -- as the franc was being phased out and the euro was being phased in -- all the talk was about how the rapidly-expanding European Union, now armed with a common currency, was about to leave us backward, reactionary Yanks eating dust.
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Trespasser'
Members of the Murder Squad in the Dublin police department are as tough as you would expect and in at least one case, tougher than need be. Antoinette Conway is the only woman in the Murder Squad and she is not popular. In fact she is thoroughly disliked and seems to relish it.
BOOK REVIEW: 'Hiler Ascent: 1889-1939'
Even at decades removed, historians remain fascinated with the why -- and how -- of Adolf Hitler's rise to evil power, and the role of the German people in his horrendous assault on mankind. Many splendid works already exist, beginning with Alan Bullock's 1952 masterpiece, and more recently, a two-volume work by Ian Kershaw in 1998 and 2000 (all of which I have read).
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Real Peter Pan: J.M. Barrie and the Boy Who Inspired Him'
J.M. Barrie was already a successful playwright when he fell in love with the Llewelyn Davies family -- mother, father, children -- and from this pivotal event, the most significant of his long life, would come the work for which he remains best known, "Peter Pan, Or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up."
BOOK REVIEW: 'Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe'
There have been so many books about the sinking by a German submarine of the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast in May 1915 that you may well ask if we need another. Only the Titanic, felled by an iceberg three years earlier, spawned more books.
BOOK REVIEW: 'House Revenge'
This is the story of Elinor Dobbs a little elderly woman in a yellow raincoat who took on the joint power of political and financial corruption in her fight to stay in her ramshackle flat.