Archive for July, 2017
Novel Captures Fear, Fellowship – Even Humor – of Soldiers in Baghdad
The men loved Sgt. Morgan – most of them, anyway. After a suicide bomber kills Morgan, only the lieutenant, the company commander and a few other men in the platoon are allowed to attend the memorial service. But Arrow and his soldiers don’t let a little thing like orders prevent them from attending Morgan’s memorial service. The guys decide to steal a Humvee from the motor pool, so the squad can drive to the service anyway. What could possibly go wrong?
You can read my review of Brave Deeds, by David Abrams, in the July 30, 2017, edition of the News & Observer, by clicking the image below.
You can buy Brave Deeds at Barnes & Noble.
“Story of a Boy and Goatherd a Tale of Violence with an Odd Beauty”
The story is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel “The Road,” where a boy and his father trudge across a vast wasteland. But Carrasco’s central characters are a young boy and an old man who herds goats. They journey across an arid land, destroyed by a terrible drought, not the unnamed disaster of “The Road.” The drought seems to have devastated the entire world, not just the boy’s village. Carrasco’s story is full of violence and religious references like McCarthy’s work, but the archaic or biblical vocabulary and cadence of McCarthy’s prose is absent here. The evil of Carrasco’s bailiff nearly matches McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.
You can read my review of Out in the Open in the July 23, 2017, edition of the News & Observer, by clicking the image below.
You can buy Out in the Open at at Barnes & Noble
Why? “An Inquisitive Physicist Delves into the Psychology and Neuroscience of Human Curiosity”
Livio has a way of indulging his readers, inviting them to draw parallels between their own inquisitive tendencies and those of history’s geniuses. Who wouldn’t want to compare themselves to Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman, whom Livio believes possessed the most curious minds that ever existed?
You can read my review of Why?: What Makes Us Curious in the July 7, 2017, edition of Science by clicking the image below.
You can buy Why? at Barnes and Noble.
“The Graybar Hotel”: Writer serving life sentence offers short stories from behind bars”
Can loneliness and boredom cause delusion? In “A Human Number,” an unnamed inmate in the county jail is so bored and lonely that he uses the jail’s automated phone system to make calls to strangers. Not everyone would know someone with this prisoner’s name, but everyone knows a “me,” so he records his name as “Heyitsme.” He discovers that retired men are the most willing to accept the charges and talk; they’re followed by elderly widows and former inmates.
You can read my review of The Graybar Hotel in July 2, 2017, edition of The Houston Chronicleby clicking the image below.
You can buy The Graybar Hotel at Barnes & Noble.
