I was expecting another courtroom drama, which Turow is famous for, but instead got a complicated who-dun-it which meshed power struggles and politics with family feuds and Greek mythol0gy. As Turow himself admits in his concluding notes, inspiration for the story came from the Gemini myth of Castor and Pollux, twins who shared in each other’s fates and spent half their time in Hades and half on Mount Olympus with the Greek Gods. Knowing that myth before reading the book gives added dimensions to Turow’s […]
Perhaps not Staggering Genius, but Heartbreaking and Profound
After reading his The Circle and then his latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They…?, I decided it was high time to go back to Egger’s first major work and see what all the fuss was about. Written when he was a mere twenty-two, this memoir/novel describes a difficult life starting with the death of both his parents from cancer within a month or two of each other, when Eggers is just 21, his younger brother Toph is just eight, his sister Beth is in law […]
Jo Nesbo gives us a new sub-zero thriller
The Redeemer is a whopping good police procedural, with the inimitable Harry Hole up against all the usual demons—first and foremost, his own depressive alcoholism, but also the deaths of those close to him, a supervisor who just doesn’t get him, the love of his life who can’t be around him, and the darkest, coldest, most oppressive setting author Jo Nesbo can bring to life. I got the chills reading this and had to wrap a blanket around me, even in the middle of the […]
Eggers does it again — a face-to-face sit down with society’s failings
Stylistically, Eggers’ newest novel is a total departure from all of his earlier ventures, as it is entirely a set of dialogues between a disturbed young man named Thomas and his various abductees, all of them being held at an abandoned military base not far from the town he grew up in along the California coast. But Fathers is fundamentally a morality play transplanted into the 21st century and, as such, is not unlike his earlier novels such as Hologram for the King and The […]
A Satanic Conspiracy of Skinny
This novel would be downright silly, if it weren’t so darned sweet. The premise of The Program is that Satan has launched a miraculous weight-loss program designed to ensnare the souls of millions of sad women who have been brainwashed into believing that curves mean fat, and fat means unsexy and unloveable. And so Lovett takes on the obsession with weight that dominates the world’s media, entertainment industry, fashion industry, and bedrooms around the globe, and presents us with a different reality, one in which […]
Pros and Cons of Using Killer Drones
A relatively even-handed and close-up look—in fictional form–at the U.S. drone program currently used in the so-called “war on terrorism,” Sting of the Drone provides the reader with an insider’s view of one of the latest and most controversial weapons currently being employed by the Obama administration. Clarke, a 30-year veteran national security advisor to multiple U.S. governments, gives us a fictionalized account of an impending Christmas attack on several U.S. cities by a combined force of al-Qaeda and drug cartel elements from “that side […]
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