reviews

101 Meetings in a Circle... Author:  Craig Brown There are 101 famous people in this book.  Most of them never met each other.  But by cleverly stringing them together, one pair at a time, writer Craig Brown has created a unique chain of meetings, entitled Hello, Goodbye, Hello.  Some of the encounters are of great historical significance; some are just humorous; while others are simply decadent. The book starts off with a bang when best-selling author Adolph Hitler, striding along a Munich walkway on a beautiful summer day in 1931, meets British noble John Scott-Ellis, after the latter knocks down [...]

Every Rock Has a Story... Author:  Jan Zalasiewicz Slate rock.   Maybe some of the most boring words in the English language.  Certainly not a book topic that seems likely to generate a lot of enthusiasm.  But things are not always as they seem and with the right teacher even the dullest ordinary stone can be the source of countless stories and mysteries.   In The Planet in a Pebble, author and geologist Jan Zalasiewicz tells the story of a single pebble found resting quietly on the coastline of Wales.  And quite a story it is. The selected pebble is not remarkable [...]

HE SPITTETH UPON YOU! Author: Betty Webb I’m accustomed to cozy mysteries having cutesy, punny titles that riff on the main character’s line of work.  So it is with great admiration that I gaze upon the title of Betty Webb’s most recent Gunn Zoo Mystery, entitled THE LLAMA OF DEATH.  Congratulations, Ms. Webb, on managing a nod to convention with a wink in the execution.  All of the Gunn Zoo Mysteries are similarly titled - *NAME OF ANIMAL* OF DEATH.  How can you not love that?  I love it so much that I’m going to use all caps every time [...]