Hold on to your hats! This April, Attack of the Books! is taking the Blogging from A to Z Challenge. What is the Blogging from A to Z Challenge? The brainchild of Arlee Bird, at Tossing it Out, the A to Z Challenges to post the letter of the alphabet every day during the month of April, with […]
Happy Birthday, Abraham Lincoln!
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Might I suggest a book on the man who may have been our greatest president? It might be said of Abraham Lincoln, born on this day in 1809, that if he had not existed, we would have needed to invent him. With very rare exception, no person in American political history […]
Review | HHhH by Laurent Binet
HHhH may be one of the most intriguing novels I have read in recent memory. Translated from French, its title is based on a German sentence: “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich”, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”. It is the story of the 1942 attack in Prague on Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most dangerous men in […]
Review | A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
Although I finished A Memory of Light over a week ago, I’ve hesitated to write a review. Reaching the end of a good novel is not unlike leaving the dark of a movie theater for the light of day. Coming back into the real world can be a bit of a jolt. The jolt at the […]
I just finished A Memory of Light…
A review of A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time) is forthcoming. First, I’ve got to get my head back in reality, just a bit.
Review | Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff
In the closing months of World War II, twenty-four serviceman and WACs climbed aboard a military transport plane for a day of sightseeing over a recently discovered “hidden valley” deep in the interior of Dutch New Guinea. Surrounded by high, jungle covered mountains and far from civilization, the valley was home to natives undiscovered by […]
At last…A Memory of Light arrives
As a teenage reader, my book choices broke down into two categories: Tolkien and everybody else. (Yes, there was also required reading for school, but books like The Scarlet Letter and The Mill on the Floss had their own place, and it certainly wasn’t among the books I would ever read if given the choice as a 15-year old. But […]
Review | Calculating God by Robert J Sawyer
I lucked out when I found Calculating God. It was one of those I’m-bored-and-I-have-nothing-to-read-so-I’ll-browse-the-shelves-and-randomly-pick-something finds. I was in for a treat. Winner of the Nebula Award, Robert Sawyer presents an interesting thought experiment: what if Earth were discovered by an alien race, or rather, TWO alien races, and they informed us that, contrary to popular […]
Review | Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray
I have friends who remind me, regularly, that wealth is becoming more and more concentrated among the wealthy. Further, the “not rich” are making less than they used to, relative to the wealthy. In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There is a divide growing in America, argues Charles […]
Review | World War Z by Max Brooks
I am not a zombie lit fan. Not at all. But it’s getting hard not to turn around without running into it. With The Walking Dead an evening drama on AMC, blockbuster movie star Brad Pitt taking the lead role in a movie based on World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, […]