Where is your nonfiction section please.
It's Halloween month! What spooky scary nonfiction might you be reading? I mean yes -- real life is scary enough, especially this year, but perhaps you're distracting from the everyday horror and existential angst with some nonfiction about less-present scariness? Just me? The wonderful Molly at Silver Button Books is again hosting Frighteningly Good Reads,... Continue Reading →
Book review: Without a Prayer, by Susan Ashline (Amazon / Book Depository) Each year, Chadwicks had a Halloween parade, and families would line Oneida Street--except for the spot in front of the redbrick building. People from the church would chase them off the lawn. Though Oneida Street was a typical stream for trick-or-treaters, no one... Continue Reading →
Book review: My Friend Anna, by Rachel DeLoache Williams (Amazon / Book Depository) If you’d asked me before I met Anna, I wouldn’t have thought I lacked this type of common sense. I was skeptical of strangers, suspicious of new people. But I didn’t see Anna coming. She slipped through my filters. You read about... Continue Reading →
Book review: Kitty Genovese, by Catherine Pelonero (Amazon / Book Depository) It was the location, many later said, that gave a heightened sense of horror to what happened. In the early morning of March 1964 in Kew Gardens, a quiet residential district of Queens, considered "idyllic" by New York City standards, a young woman named Kitty... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Trouble with Tom, by Paul Collins (Amazon / Book Depository) He should have been dead from the start. He'd been cheating Death almost from the beginning: at the age of nineteen, leaving his parents' home for the first time, Pain - he'd not yet added the final e to his name—set out... Continue Reading →
Book review: Incendiary, by Michael Cannell (Amazon / Book Depository) In 1956 there was no such thing as criminal profiling; nobody could recall an instance when the police had consulted a psychiatrist. It was a collaboration fabricated in detective novels, but never found in real life. Every one of today’s profilers, real or televised, traces his... Continue Reading →
Book review: Voices from the Rust Belt, edited by Anne Trubek (Amazon / Book Depository) These essays address segregated schools, rural childhoods, suburban ennui, lead poisoning, opiate addiction, and job loss. They reflect upon happy childhoods, successful community ventures, warm refuges for outsiders, and hidden oases of natural beauty. But mainly they are stories drawn... Continue Reading →
Book review: Notes from No Man's Land, by Eula Biss (Amazon / Book Depository) I discovered Eula Biss's confrontational but melodic, intelligent and analytical writing in the collection Tales of Two Americas. It's a great collection of essays, stories, and poems all dealing somehow with various aspects of American inequality. She contributed a piece about the concept of... Continue Reading →
Book review: One Hundred Miles From Manhattan, by Guillermo Fesser Americans tend to get restless and move around a lot. They effortlessly leave one state for another. Don't think it's easy to guess their origin. Curiously, Americans tend to tell me they are from the place where they currently live rather than sharing the name... Continue Reading →
Image of World Trade Center fog, November 1998. By Flickr user Beija (http://www.flickr.com/photos/beija/243997357) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Book review: 102 Minutes, by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn Amazon From the moment the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, 102 minutes passed... Continue Reading →
Book review: Give a Girl a Knife, by Amy Thielen Amy Thielen, host of the Food Network's Heartland Table, is a girl of two worlds - the ultra-high-end, gourmet restaurant kitchens of New York City, one of the most competitive restaurant environments ever; and her folksy home of rural Minnesota, where she honed her cooking skills and "taste memories" drawing on... Continue Reading →
Book review: After Henry, by Joan Didion (Amazon / Book Depository) There's no other storyteller like Joan Didion. She can take the most boring fact and spin a narrative yarn around it that boggles the mind. She can tie so many elements together in telling a story and making a point about politics, culture, or... Continue Reading →
What's Nonfiction? 