Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category
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- Richard Condon’s Prizzi’s Money • March 27, 1994
This book review was originally published in the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star on March 27, 1994. When a man and a woman fall in love and one of them has connections to the Mafia, that’s tragedy. When a man and a woman fall in love and both of them have connections to the Mafia, that’s Richard [...]
- Douglas Cooper’s Amnesia • February 23, 1994
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore City Paper on February 23, 1994. Canadian author Douglas Cooper’s debut novel, Amnesia, is a lot like an Escher painting. It twists your mind into strange positions, it dabbles in philosophically challenging angles and perceptions that could never exist in real life, and it ultimately leaves [...]
- Elizabeth Tallent’s Honey • February 9, 1994
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore City Paper on February 9, 1994. “It gets James out of bed in the barely-there light,” Elizabeth Tallent writes at the beginning of the story “James Was Here,” the last (and best) in her new collection, Honey. “He’s going to carry a gun.” Like most of [...]
- Larry Beinhart’s “American Hero” • December 10, 1993
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore City Paper on December 10, 1993. Edgar Award-winning author Larry Beinhart’s latest novel, American Hero, accuses Bush and friends of some serious noodling with the international mindset, by scheming up the Persian Gulf War to guarantee reelection in 1992. American Hero gives a fictional account of [...]
- Roy Lewis’s “The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father” • October 15, 1993
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on October 15, 1993. Published without fanfare some thirty years ago in England, Roy Lewis’ Evolution Man: Or, How I Ate My Father has been rescued from the bowels of obscurity by Italian publisher Roberto Calasso. And this comic tale of Pleistocene civilization is [...]
- Philip Roth’s “Operation Shylock” • October 11, 1993
Philip Roth's "Operation Shylock" asks why it is that American Jews — the so-called "normalized" Jews like Roth — can both revere and detest Israel at the same time. Is there a real truth about the so-called Holy Land and the people that support it, or is truth simply in the eye of the beholder?
- T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Road to Wellville” • July 19, 1993
This book review was originally published in the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 19, 1993. Any doctor that prescribed five enemas a day, sexual abstinence, and high doses of radium exposure for an ulcer would be kicked out of town before sunset. Unless, of course, that doctor was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and that town [...]
- Jay McInerney’s “Brightness Falls” • June 21, 1993
Jay McInerney's novel "Bright Lights, Big City" predicted the end of the Me Decade all the way back in 1984 simply by using the fundamental law of gravity: what goes up must come down. His new novel, "Brightness Falls," details the fulfillment of that prophecy.
- Paul Auster’s “Leviathan” • December 14, 1992
Paul Auster's "Leviathan" is harrowing reading, to be sure. With seven novels to his credit, there seems to be no limit to Auster's uncanny ability to deconstruct human behavior.
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