reviews

Teen Drama with an Evil Twist... Author:  Simon Rich A wimpy, overweight, self-conscious eighth grade boy – bullied by the school’s star athlete and in lust with the school’s prettiest girl – finds a way to exact some revenge for the many injustices he’s suffered.  Not exactly a distinctive story line.  But in Elliot Allagash, writer Simon Rich adds some unique wrinkles in an attempt to create something different.  Maybe if I write a bit more, I’ll be able to decide if I think he succeeds. Our victim is Seymour Herson, the lowest kid on the totem pole at Glendale, [...]

The Next Human Pandemic? Author: David Quammen Plenty of people have considered humankind’s demise.  A rare month goes by when there isn’t some new post-apocalyptic movie or TV show available for the insatiable disaster-addicted audience.  But how might it really play out?   Will humanity go down with a bang or a whimper?  Well, David Quammen isn’t making any predictions, but in the year 2000, while sitting around a campfire in Central Africa, he got to talking to some men who had witnessed a local Ebola outbreak and it got him thinking. Combining a decade of thinking, researching, traveling and interviewing, [...]

A Musical Trip to Vienna, 1824... Author:  Harvey Sachs Time travel may never exist, but it’s still fun to imagine what it would be like to venture back to a specific date in history.  If given the opportunity, classical music lovers could do worse than to choose May 7th, 1824 when Beethoven’s 9th Symphony premiered in Vienna.  In The Ninth, music writer and historian Harvey Sachs explores what it might have been like. Sachs starts out with a bevy of biographical background which explains how Beethoven rose through the crowded ranks of a vibrant music scene to become one of [...]