Where is your nonfiction section please.
Book review: One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson (Amazon / Book Depository) Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. The Federal Reserve made the mistake that precipitated the stock market crash. Al Capone enjoyed his last summer of eminence. The Jazz Singer was filmed. Television was created. Radio came of age. Sacco and Vanzetti were... Continue Reading →
Book review: Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston (Amazon / Book Depository) Though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going. It may be true, and often is, that every person we hold dear... Continue Reading →
Book review: A Library Miscellany, by Claire Cock-Starkey (Amazon / Book Depository) Without hesitation, I can say one of the things I love most is the library. The cover picture on this site is the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library, one of my favorite places to be. I've been attached to... Continue Reading →
Book review: Truevine, by Beth Macy (Amazon / Book Depository) Beth Macy, a former Roanoke Times journalist, first heard about the Muse brothers during her work at the paper in the 1980s. Their story was well-known, but not in much detail: the outline was that two albino African-American brothers were kidnapped by the circus and spent... Continue Reading →
Book review: Death in the Air, by Kate Winkler Dawson (Amazon / Book Depository) In 1952, two killers stalked postwar London. One was a serial killer: an average-looking, mostly unremarkable, middle-aged invoice clerk operating out of a grungy, now-notorious apartment building; the other was far more insidious and claimed many more victims: a suffocating, polluting smog that killed around 12,000 people.... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Man From the Train, by Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James (Amazon / Book Depository) "He was a tiny man who cast a huge and terrible shadow, and he knew that, and in his mind he was the size of his shadow." Between 1898 and 1912, an unbelievably large number of families... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Day Will Pass Away, by Ivan Chistyakov (Amazon / Book Depository) So even my inner word recedes day by day into eternity until it reaches freezing point. You start believing they can make you lose all emotion. Yet every day brings you nearer to freedom. Only, what kind of path are you walking to get there?... Continue Reading →
Book review: Among the Living and the Dead, by Inara Verzemnieks "This is why I had journeyed to my grandmother's lost village, nestled at the edge of Latvia, which is itself nestled at the edge of Europe's psychic north, south, east and west, or, as Pope Innocent III described it...'the edge of the known world'. Because I... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Truth About Belle Gunness, by Lillian de la Torre On a spring day in 1908, police were called to the scene of a fire in a farmhouse in La Porte, Indiana. In the ruins of the house, they discovered four bodies: three children and a headless adult believed to be the farm's proprietress,... Continue Reading →
Book review: Murder in Matera, by Helene Stapinski Author and journalist Helene Stapinski comes from a long family line of thieves and crooks, as detailed in her popular history of crime and theft in Jersey City (especially her family's participation in it), Five Finger Discount. In her new memoir, Murder in Matera, Stapinski travels to the Basilicata region of... Continue Reading →
Book review: City of Light, City of Poison, by Holly Tucker (Amazon / Book Depository) In the late 1600s during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, a network of witches, fortune tellers, apothecaries, priests, charlatans and magic and medicine people operated in the shadows of Paris. They provided desperate customers with the medicinal powders and... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Midnight Assassin, by Skip Hollingsworth (Amazon / Book Depository) Journalist Skip Hollingsworth asks near the beginning of The Midnight Assassin: "Why is it that certain sensational events in history are remembered and others, just as dramatic, are completely forgotten?" Jack the Ripper committed his notorious murders in London's East End a mere three... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 