The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair
In 1968, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris stood as one of the few government-funded and operated tributes to cinema in the world. Henri Langlois, who cofounded the organization in the 1930s, still ran it. During […]
Category Archives: Book Review
Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach
Good novels read themselves; bad novels require work. Deborah Moggach’s Tulip Fever, a bad novel, required work. In fairness to the novel, as a historical romance, it’s not the genre I often read. But I […]
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
As a new nation, America lacks a national epic. We do not have an Iliad or a Gilgamesh Epic or a Beowulf to connect us to antiquity, to a time before written language, to the […]
Book Review: The Long Day’s Evening
It’s been a goal of mine–unsatisfactorily fulfilled–to include in these pages reviews not only of novels from my own country, but also those written overseas. A culture can become myopic if it views the world […]
Book Review: Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews
Though set in modern times, when Putin is president of Russia, Red Sparrow reads like a Cold War spy thriller. As Jason Matthews, the novelist who wrote it, tells us in the narration, although the […]
Book Review: The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey
There’s a theory–I’m not saying I subscribe to it, but it’s out there–that you can judge the times by the horror stories it tells. In my childhood and youth, stories about ghosts and vampires–life after death–prevailed. […]
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Unfortunately at the movies last weekend, I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie based on Annihilation. Since I wanted to review the novel before I knew a lot about the movie, I’ve been avoiding […]
Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist
We need to get fear back into the vampire tale! I thought that back in 1990. Maybe it was 1991. I’m not sure, because I didn’t write these things down back then like I do […]
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly as a name is ironic, because everywhere she goes, she goes loudly. She’s a seeker with only a vague idea of what she hopes to find. She’s also a runaway with a clear […]
Book Review: Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon
The Nook, Barnes and Noble e-reader, lacks the same cachet as Amazon’s Kindle, but it has at least one noteworthy feature that makes it the right reader in a specific situation. That situation is when […]