reviews

Germination Genius... Author:  Thor Hanson Are they dead or alive?  Even with a magnifying glass it’s impossible to tell if there’s any life in a handful of beans or an old dried up peach pit.  Yet even in the harshest conditions seeds can display incredible  durability.  You can neglect them in the driest desert, send them through the digestive tract of a grizzly bear, expose them to the vacuum of space or bury them in rubble for more than two thousand years and they can manage to germinate if you provide them with just enough soil, water and air.  In [...]

The End of Everything Author: William Black “We told her what our father had instructed us to tell her. ‘We have been to the end of the universe,” we said. ‘We have seen the end of everything.’” An austere collection of twelve haunting stories, William Black’s debut collection combines the nostalgic loss of innocence from To Kill a Mockingbird with the down-and-out brutality of mining life from How Green Was My Valley, coloring everything in a modern tinge of dirt and backwoods desperation. Raw, the words echo with the lairs of emotion beneath them: the moments of beauty and agony, [...]

What happens when an author wants to deliver a moral and not a story Author: Michael Crichton Starting with assassinations and science, Michael Crichton’s 2009 bestseller, State of Fear, promises a dilemma between hard facts and what-if scenarios implemented by ecological terrorists. NERF (National Environment Resource Fund), a mega-conglomerate environmental agency, is raising awareness for the drastic, climate altering effects of global warming, but when their uber rich sponsor, philanthropist George Morton, finds opposing scientific evidence, the structure and the funding of NERF is challenged. When George disappears in a fatal car accident, only his whiney attorney (Peter Evans) and [...]