reviews

Heavy is the Teenage Head Who Wears the Crown Author: Meg Cabot After finishing the absolutely delightful and side-splitting Heather Wells series, I was desperate for another Meg Cabot fix. The Princess Diaries, progenitors of many sequels both of the film and book variety, is a title you can’t miss hearing mentioned – again and again. I’d never read it, however, since it seemed like a teen/chick-lit book which embodies the exact sort of reading experience I avoid. However, Cabot had convinced me with her spunky, self-derogatory, and continually imperiled Heather Wells that she could take any storyline and make it [...]

Violent fame... Author:  Norman Mailer It was more than forty years ago, so long ago that Geraldo was still cool.  But when it comes to the topic of capital punishment in the United States, 1977 was a pivotal year.  Five years earlier, the US Supreme Court had stopped the practice, ruling that it was unfairly implemented as well as cruel and unusual.  To many observers, it seemed like the death penalty was on its way out.  Nonetheless, 37 states proceeded to write new laws and on January 17th, 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by a firing squad at the Utah [...]

Germs are  hell... Author:  Elizabeth A. Fenn Epidemic?  What epidemic?  It’s an unsettling part of American history that you may have never heard of.  Starting in 1775, a tiny little virus – 300 whole nanometers in diameter – threatened to completely derail the Thirteen Colonies bid for freedom from Great Britain.  Small pox had appeared on the North American continent occasionally prior to the American Revolution, but this particular epidemic had an exceptionally wide ranging impact, spanning the entire continent.  Combining dramatic colonial history with intriguing medical forensics, historian Elizabeth A. Fenn deftly chronicles the story of Europe’s most devastating [...]