Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is such a clear thinking scientist that he manages, through analogy, metaphor, logical argument, and example to make his points with the kind of clarity that religious theologians rarely reach. This book is a joy to read, and never gets dry or terse. Instead Dawkins’ good humour and sense of humanistic pleasure in science and discovery are constantly evident.

A review of The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1

Overall, Gourevitch’s hope that these interviews will stand “if not as definitive portraits of each artist, then as a significant contribution to such an ultimate portrait, with the added fascination that they are in large measure self-portraits” has been, on my reading, largely fulfilled.

A review of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Eco sustains his fantasy with the skill of a gifted writer, but sometimes he resembles the woman who thinks that she can make it on just sex appeal. The studied pose of a gifted writer can slip and leave great empty places exposed. He will carry you forward with more skill than in his other works, and, magician-like, induce you to read the whole of a long, long book, but the final pages miss the target and he – and his reader – has to content himself with a gestures rather than reality.

A review of All Will Be Revealed by Robert Anthony Siegel

The transformation of both Augustus and Verena forms the stuff of which All Will Be Revealed is made. Siegel is incredibly gifted in narrative ability and speed. His instinct for characterization is flawless and economical. He makes as much and as well of his minor as of his major characters. His performance is deft and sure.

A review of On Opera by Bernard Williams

This book will contribute something to your knowledge of opera but it will not be easy to read. The awkwardness of Williams’s English makes the book unpleasant. It baffles me that a man who obviously had such a love for music could have written so unmusically.

A review of The Aeneid by Virgil

I am not a Latinist but I have over the years immersed myself in Latin texts and have a little knowledge of the problems that Fagles faced. Virgil began The Aeneid in the most striking way he could manage and a line or two from near the opening becomes eminently suitable for comparison of the original with Fagles’s translation.

A review of A Writer’s San Francisco by Eric Maisel

In fact, I haven’t enjoyed a book on writing this much since encountering Stephen King’s On Writing some years ago. When I got to the end of A Writer’s San Francisco, I actually felt compelled to go back to the beginning and reread it immediately, such is its charm and inspirational qualities.

A review of Chutney Power and Other Stories

He is deliberate, meticulous, and splendidly disciplined. The stories are perhaps not original in form but they would serve without degradation of any sort as works by a Chekov or a Joyce. Reviewed by Bob Williams Chutney Power and Other…

A review of One of Us One Night by Mark Wisniewski

There are seventeen poems in this chapbook so that in this brief book the poems are all fairly long. Most of them explore situations or play with narrative possibilities. The ingenuity is significant and the care in the selection of…