How many times can you read a book. Well, I have read Walden so many times I can’t believe some of the ideas in it did not originate with me. Anyway, Bob, a good friend, suggested my doing poems on books instead of critiques. Drop whatever you are doing, or think you’re doing, and read Thoreau’s classic, but for a teaser, here is my poem:
Order Walden directly from amazon for only $3.50. Click: Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (Dover Thrift Editions)
Raw Footage
ISBN: 9780711941311
Price: $24.95
Height: 12, Width: 9
Pages: 192
Binding: Paperback
Publication 9/1/2009
The cover promises “X-Rated Photos” and there are plenty of bare breasts and occasional limp penises, but this piece of pop history is interesting for other reasons depending upon who you, the reader are… Read the rest of this entry »
Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets by Mary Buffett & David ClarkI read something in the first chapter of this little book that I have been thinking about for days: “Pick the right business to work for.” It seems simple, but means the difference between a high-paying career and a life of drudgery. Yet most of us, at least when the age we are first looking for a job, take anything. We don’t feel we deserve choice. In a nutshell, that is the most amazing quality of this compendium of five simple principles for personal and business success, it empowers the reader… Read the rest of this entry »
The Things They Carried is the most powerful writing about Vietnam or about any modern war. In the Lake of the Woods, by the same author, is one of the worst.
How can that be? In the first book the ator takes tackles the subject head on. Anyone who has ever lived and re-lived that war (as I have) knows O’Brien has expressed the impossible. His chapter “How to Tell a True War Story,” that first appeared in Esquire,… Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry, Jessica, not for us!
by Jessica Page Morrell
Tarcher/Penguin, 2009
358 pages, $11.53
Subtitled “A (Sort of ) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing Is Being Rejected,” I do think the tone is sympathetic. The how-to advice is directed where it should be—not how to trick publishers and agents into liking what you do—but making what you do appealing to readers (including publishers and agents). I love the emphasis on scenes, and the book’s… Read the rest of this entry »
A must read!
Built to Sell
by John Warrillow
flipjetmedia, 2010
160 pages, $25.95
This is a book every entrepreneur must read, whether or not they are going to sell their business. Years ago I read a book stating that there are people good at starting an enterprise, those who can make it profitable, others who excel at sustaining it and finally, a unique few individuals who can figure out how to profitably get out from under it. A business needs all four. This book… Read the rest of this entry »
Looking for Fame, the Life of a Pop Princess, Lady Gaga
by Paul Lester
Omnibus Press
$17.95, 154 pages
Since “Just Dance” nearly two years ago, she’s had six top 10 hits and has almost single-handedly revived the waning art of music videos. What did we talk about before we had Lady Gaga to talk about? She owns pop culture these days. Read the rest of this entry »
The New Yorker Stories
by Ann Beattie
Scribner
$30, 516 pages
Beattie’s stories (then and now) articulate certain confusions and disappointments that often haunt the reader not as fiction but as things that have happened in real life. Now when I look at a short story writer, I am most concerned with what I, as a writer can learn, and pieces by Hemingway, Faulkner, even my favorite, Raymond Carver, Read the rest of this entry »
by Peter Doggett & Patrick Humphries
Omnibus Press
$14.95, 194 pages
If you watched the PBS special on John Lennon, this book is everything that production was sorely missing. The TV show reached for some simple psychological melodrama, but The Beatles were anything but simple. Doggett and Humphries document the complexity of every song, every album, every concert, every recording session in a way that is enjoyably profound. Read the rest of this entry »
by Garrison Keillor
High Bridge, 2011, 5th Edition
$12.95, 400 pages
There’s a reason good sales people are good joke tellers. As Keillor points out in the introduction to this book, “It’s a way to get to know people in a short time.” And how do you review a joke book? You don’t. Readers want some examples and if they don’t laugh, forget it. If they do it’s A Pretty Good Joke Book.
Vintage, 284 pages, $15
I often sit around and talk to my TV, so I thought why not talk to the books I read too. Their content might even answer:
JOHN: Here’s a book that’s kind of Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy meets 12 Angry Men. Why should I care about a cellist who can’t perform, the jury trial of a Buddhist who kills his guru, a forty-year-old guy virgin who is clueless around women?
THE SOLOIST: Because I pull you into music by having the narrator teach a young Korean boy (and you) something about it, because the murder (the narrator is on the jury) mirrors the psychological state of the cellist and because most guys reading a book a book at night are clueless around women. Read the rest of this entry »
244 pages, The University Press of Kentucky, 27.99
The emphasis is on “philosophy” but some of the essays, such as, “The Darker Shade: Realism in Neo-Noir” and Jerold J. Abrams take on the different kinds of mazes and how they are reflected in various stages of Noir make for insightful reading. Plus there are the endless titles that will send you to your library’s on-line catalog.
Here’s my own take:
To order this book driectly from Amazon for $24.95, click: The Philosophy of Film Noir (The Philosophy of Popular Culture)
Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert, 2011
448 pages, Grand Central Publishing, 27.99
Usually our “butting heads” approach to books is pitting one of them against another, but in the case of this Roger Ebert autobiography, we thought it might be interesting to invite our movie review critics, John and his dog. Spanky, in from the other room to get their take.
JOHN: Well this long book has some ups and downs, mainly because I think a reader goes to it for some specific interest (behind the scenes on his relationship with Gene Siskel or Ebert’s take on famous movie directors) and then Read the rest of this entry »
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. Here’s my poetic take:
Buy the book directly from Amazon for only $8.81. Click: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel
I have read this book at least five times (at various stages of my life), but, as I was telling my friend Rod, a real classic is one that mirrors different things in you each time you read it. Usually I am in a Nick Caraway mood, but this past holiday, I felt more like the disillusioned Gatsby. Why doesn’t matter, but the book was there for me, and that does. Rather than write an essay that states the obvious I thought I would indulge myself with a poem that is my take on the classic. See what you think. John
Hot Rod Magazine, All the Covers by Drew Hardin
Motorbooks, 2011
256 pages, $35 (hardback)
It is hard looking at this to not remember those days, years ago, standing in a drugstore, reading car magazines for free. Fantasies of revved up cars are as close as most of us ever got to hot rods. Though I did know one guy who sold his Harley Davidson a few years ago to buy one—it never left his garage.
Skimming over the hot rod’s history, it all seemed to begin on those dry lake flats. Then it was the phantom-like Mercury and Lincoln customs, muscle cars, and finally…automobiles became too expensive to mess with. They were no longer every boy’s dream, but rather family vans.
Forget all the hot roadsters and hopped-up engines, the magazine cover from May 1952 embodied every young man’s ideal. It is a pointed breast co-ed crossing the street in front of two guys in a souped-up red, V8. This was sex appeal. If you were of those teen-age years then you might get a kick of this retrospective (there’s even a cover of Dragnet’s Jack Webb admiring the engine of a “big rod”). But times changed (even though they launched a swimsuit edition long before Sports Illustrated).
I dunno, maybe we grew up.
Buy this directly from Amazon for $23. Click: Hot Rod Magazine All the Covers
Murder in Lascaux by Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden
Terrace Books (University of Wisconsin Press), 2011
284 pages, $26.95 (cloth)
This is the kind of book that you are glad when it is finished. Not because it isn’t good—murder in prehistoric caves, hidden French/German collaboration, endless meals and a cooking school—but because you’ve had enough. The cast of characters is OK and it is interesting how a book written by a couple focuses on the perspective of the female character.
Let me add that the parallels between modern family members and those of the past give the reader some first- hand involvement. And the last sentence of the book is one of the best I have ever read.
Thoroughly researched, I would recommend this for those attracted to historic writing or writing about place. Though there are surprises to keep you wondering, the story lacks a dramatic arc. I fault the fastidiousness of the authors. Had they played even a little looser with events Murder in Lascaux might have proved a more exciting journey.
Order directly from Amazon for $17. Click: Murder in Lascaux
1008 pages, $12.99
World Almanac Books
Adele and Derek Jeter Grace
This telephone directory of facts offers, well everything. But let me give you a sample of what you might not expect:
1. David Nelson died at 74; the last surviving member of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
2. “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” – President Obama in a tribute to Steve Jobs Read the rest of this entry »
Well, I just lost my review of The Humbling—how’s that for being humbling—but I think I have a twist that makes up for this.
A friend tells me that Al Pacino has optioned the Phillip Roth novel and it is hard to think of anyone else in this role of a passed-his-prime actor who is wondering how to make it all happen one more time. He is also toying with suicide and the climactic performance is his death at his own hands (very Chekov). He is trying to find his old self through a series of younger woman and it is hard to imagine that this isn’t also Roth stomping the stage, remembering his own bravado, literary performances of the past. Read the rest of this entry »
