reviews

Alone in Antarctica... Author:  David Grann What drives a man to leave his beautiful family to pursue incredibly dangerous adventures?  Is it hubris?  Depression?  Mid-life crisis?  Some intricately woven tapestry of all three?  I argue that anybody who says they know – even the actual participants – is lying.  I think it’s one big fat mystery.  Nonetheless, it makes for terrific reading. Starting in 2008, driven only by his own inner demons, Henry Worsley – a lieutenant colonel in the British Army – chose to pursue some of the most treacherous adventures possible, reenacting some of the greatest feats of [...]

Be Careful What You Wish For Author: Chloe Benjamin In the summer of 1969 four siblings discover an old fortune teller and the exact dates of their deaths. They live and grow with this knowledge, fearing the possibility of prophetic truth. They have remained silent since that date, never discussing the disturbing old woman or revealing their assigned death dates to one another. We just know that one, the eldest, Varya, was given a long life. We suspect that the others weren’t so lucky. And so author Chloe Benjamin takes us through the separate lives of each child, bouncing from [...]

If Jaws Were About Escaped Science Experiments Author: Peter Benchley Simon Chase is struggling to maintain his new oceanographic institute perched on a precarious island just off the Connecticut shore. He’s making a new start, sans his society wife and his son. His biggest foes appear to be local fisherman and a mounting pile of debt, but when a Great White he has been tracking starts appearing with strange claw wounds just as some local fisherman mysteriously disappear, he begins to suspect that the quiet swells hide something far more deadly. Simon’s focus soon shifts, however, when a new, wealthy [...]