reviews

Na zdorovie! Cheers to house arrest with cocktails Author: Amor Towles “It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is much more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.” This is a line I loved—and one that has stuck with me—from Amor Towles’ first novel, the critically acclaimed and wholly engaging Rules of Civility. Thankfully, Towles is right. No one bothered me at Starbucks the other day when I was finishing his new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, which was a very good thing. Because if anyone had interrupted me [...]

Prehistoric jerky... Author:  Björn Kurtén What did woolly mammoth taste like?  I assume it tasted like chicken, but modern humans may never know.  Our Paleolithic forebears had plenty of experience with the beasts, however.  They stalked, killed and consumed mammoths with some regularity, possibly contributing to the beasts’ eventual extinction.  If pondering the lives of our ancient human ancestors and the wild creatures they lived with tickles your frontal cortex, I can enthusiastically recommend How to Deep-Freeze a Mammoth by Björn Kurtén. A professor at the University of Helsinki from 1955 until his death in 1988, Kurtén gained some level [...]

A Melodramatic Mystery with a Twist Author: Harlan Coben Ready for a nine hour drive, the fiancé and I once again dug into my mystery box of eBay purchased audio books. This time, Harlan Coben’s novel Play Dead, a twisting mystery as the back cover blurb promised, went into the CD player and we both kicked back for the long ride and the murky story. Imagine then what a surprise it was to encounter, even before chapter one, a warning from the author advocating only stolid fans to proceed and all others to run, not walk away from this, his first [...]