reviews

Love and War Author: Richard Flanagan Another disappointing Man Booker prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a conglomeration of stories where insipid self-indulgence and second rate romance overshadow the undeniable effects of war and the terrorization POWs in Japanese camps experienced on a daily basis. Effortlessly brutal and bleak, the scenes of sore scabbed skeletons working on railroads as excrement puddles at their feet and guards lash their backs seems to have no connection to the back and forth play of time concentrating on a misguided romance that ultimately seems to be given more emotional weight than [...]

Set your clock back? Author:  James Gleick To when would you go?  If a device could take you anywhere in time, what would be your destination?  Ever since H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, the question has engaged countless imaginations.  In Time Travel, celebrated journalist and science historian James Gleick explores the reality and mystery behind the concept.  It’s a wide ranging work, very much indebted to Wells’ ground breaking idea. H.G. Wells in 1920 Appropriately so, in a book about time, Gleick starts at the beginning with the backstory behind H.G. Wells’ famous novel, going [...]

Father Tim's Lackluster Wedding Author: Jan Karon Back to the down home adventures of Father Tim, I took a detour from the proscribed reading pattern and after finishing A Light in the Window (the second book in the series) jumped immediately to book 6, A Common Life. As readers already know, A Light in the Window starts in a dismal season where Father Tim faces his own feared inability to love and accept romance in his life. The tale progresses frustratingly from a teetering mélange of teen-like disaster to its obvious by-products: Father Tim’s extreme emotional turmoil and Cynthia’s gradual slide into hopeless rejection when [...]