Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A review of Bluff by Lenore Skomal

Bluff was born from Skomal’s own experience sitting at her gravely ill mother’s bedside, and the frustration, fear and hope all come through in her writing. To her credit, she hasn’t only drawn on this experience in writing Bluff, but has enlisted the advice of health, religious and legal professionals, all of whom are acknowledged.

A review of The Return of the Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

If you’re like me, you’ll want to read everything that Hammett has written, but be warned that this is not literature, simply because language doesn’t set out to do everything.  Then again, screen stories like these (and The Third Man by Graham Greene is another example) are an interesting genre, primarily for what they might reveal about the writer.

A review of The Shadow Year by Hannah Richell

It is in this setting that the dual tragedies unfold as each character faces the practical, ethical and moral dilemmas they have inherited from the past. She builds up tension by releasing the story in carefully crafted chapters told from two different perspectives of the events which happen in the two different periods of time.

Bob Rich’s Ascending Spiral

The author of Ascending Spiral talks about his latest novel,about genre bending, the books themes, its characters, sustainability, about being a Renaissance man, on optimism and pessimism, and lots more.

A review of The United States Chess Championship, 1845-2011 Third Edition by Andy Soltis

Soltis provides a crisp and lively narrative which ripples outward from the book’s strict subject matter on occasion to consider, for example, the career and fate of Paul Morphy. There is a generous selection of games, full tournament crosstables and some interesting statistics (e.g. Fine has one of the highest winning percentages in the championship with 78%, despite never having won it; for comparison: Fischer has the highest with 83.3%).

A review of Tune Your Chess Tactics Antenna by Emmanuel Neiman

The strengths of the book include the freshly minted examples of classical tactical themes (virtually all games date from 2011 and 2012) and the systematic approach overall, as regards both the tactics and Neiman’s account of the thinking process (combinational vision, calculation, evaluation).

A review of Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara

The theme that unknown and uncontrollable forces beyond and within oneself determine one’s fate is typical of the “naturalist” school of writers. Among the famous naturalist writers are Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy and Jack London, who show people as biological entities who respond to environmental forces and internal stresses that they do not fully understand and cannot control. O’Hara differs from these earlier naturalist novelists in that he lacks their social conscience, and focuses upon the wealthy, rather than the poor, but his “naturalism” is demonstrated by his blunt style and frank, brutal depiction of human interactions.