Opening this weekend, Chris Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” has a run time of 3 hours, is very light on CGI, and is rated R for sexuality, nudity, and language.* Released in 1986, Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb is 896 pages (or 37 hours on Audible) long, has zero CGI scenes, and, well, is not rated […]
Short Review: Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
2023-07-14 · by ·
Neil Gaiman has his fans, and they are passionate. I’ve enjoyed a book or two of his, myself. But when Norse Mythology came out in 2017, it felt like the Gaiman fans turned out in droves to read (what looked to me) an opportunistic money grab by the famous author. Thor: Ragnarok, the second—and best—of […]
Happy Birthday, Tom Clancy
2023-04-12 · by ·
My first introduction to Tom Clancy and his world of espionage and military techno-thrillers was The Hunt for the Red October. Dad handed it to me sometime in my early teens, and I remember seeing the movie with him shortly after it came out. I’ll never forget it. it. I remember Sean Connery’s character, Russian […]
Review | The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff
2023-03-06 · by ·
As I write this, it is March 5, the anniversary of the Boston Massacre (or an “Unhappy Disturbance” if you were British) on a cold night in 1770. It started as an argument between a British soldier and several Boston residents and soon escalated as a crowd gathered, chasing the soldier back to the Customs […]
Review | Everything Sad Is Untrue: (a true story) by Daniel Nayeri
2023-02-08 · by ·
It is for books like this that I joined a book club. The elevator pitch for Everything Sad Is Untrue is this: it is the story, told in first person, of middle school-aged Daniel Nayeri, a refugee from Iran, grappling with life in Oklahoma, divorce, and, generally, being different. Told in snippets, memories, flashbacks, and […]
Short Review | Forty Autumns: A Family’s Story of Courage and Survival on Both Sides of the Berlin Wall by Nina Willmer
2023-01-04 · by ·
There are books that are great not because of how they are written, but because of the information they carry, the story they tell, or the truth they convey. Forty Autumns is just such a book, great because it tells a story that is heartbreaking and tragic, because it is true, and because it is […]
Short Review | Endurance by Alfred Lansing
2022-10-11 · by ·
If you asked me for a book recommendation, no questions asked, and you would read it, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance would be near the top of that list, if not the whole list. In 1914, on the verge of WWI, Ernest Shackleton set sail on the Endurance, planning to sail to Antarctica and cross the frozen […]
Review | The Terminal List by Jack Carr
2022-09-03 · by ·
There seems to be a trend in movies lately to make characters gray. They’re not bad, but they’re not all that good, either. With so many gray characters out there, finding a hero you can cheer for without any reservations can be refreshing. Jack Carr provides that kind of character, and though there’s an argument […]
Summary | On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
2022-04-28 · by ·
In George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984, “thought crime”—a person’s politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of the ruling party—is an even more serious offense than committing an actual crime. In other words, even allowing yourself to have a thought that does not conform to what the ruling […]
Review | The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
2022-04-08 · by ·
Matt Haig’s books have the most interesting premises. In The Humans, his lead character is a body-snatching alien who occupies the body of a human. It turns out that the human wasn’t a very nice man, which the alien who now inhabits his body discovers when sent to hide evidence that the human has found […]
