Reviews

Today we hear a lot about choice. We hear that it is within our power to make choices that benefit us and to take responsibility for choices that haven’t. Good messages, but are they true. Free Will argues that choice is an illusion. Author Sam Harris has degrees in philosophy and neuroscience, and he makes a convincing argument about how our brains and bodies are already choosing prior to our taking any action.

Rachel Cohn has outdone herself with this post-apocalyptic world and most of us might consider the ramifications of cloning. Beta is set on the island of Demesne, where the air is so full of oxygen that it almost feels like paradise.

When you get to the end of a book you've loved, there’s a sadness that it’s over.  But when I finished Their Eyes Were Watching God I was glad - glad that I had read this again.

In Walker’s beautifully-written debut novel, it’s the end of the world as we know it, but instead of a sudden vampire plague or apocalyptic alien invasion, scientists discover that the Earth’s rotation is slowing.  Days and nights are getting longer, birds are dying, and whales are beaching themselves by the thousands.

In A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders takes a thunderstorm and illustrates how it can dance across three generations. Sanders not only spotlights the beauty and spectacle a thunderstorm can create, but also its rude and wild fury.

How far would you go to know the truth about your father? When orphan Carver Young discovers a letter written by his father, he becomes caught up in the hunt for a notorious killer who just may hold the keys to his past.

Summerland takes place on Nantucket beginning on graduation day.  Four high school juniors—twins, Penny and Hobby; Jake, Penny’s boyfriend, and longtime friend Demeter—have been celebrating the graduation of their classmates.  And yes, included in the celebration was underag

A shout out to a nearly forgotten genre, the Western! In prep for an upcoming book club I picked up Louis L'Amour's Mustang Man, a simple story about a lone cowboy making his way in the West who gets wrapped up in a chase for gold.

You may remember Sally Mann from a book of photographs published in the 1990s. The book includes a number of photographs of Mann’s children hanging out, without clothing, near the family’s cabin beside a lake. The photographs were hailed by art critics as a tremendous achievement while criticized by many, many others because they put her children on display.

There is more to food tasting then just wine and cheese tasting parties. And this book tells us all about it.  It provides tips how to entertain a group of friends while indulging in the best the food world has to offer.