Reviews

This very enjoyable and engaging non-fiction book is a detailed biography of one of the great female rulers, Catherine the Great of Russia.  She was born Sophia, a minor German princess, and was just 14 years old when she was summoned by the Russian court.

“Thus it was that the dawn of sensibility was mistaken for the onset of senility.”

Mighty Macs is an inspiring true story about the love of basketball, with nuns, and tiny Immaculata College of girls.  Can the new girl’s basketball team save their school?  Great story and movie.  The actors are Carla Gugino and David Boreanaz.

Brooklyn, Burning is the story of a homeless teen named Kid who falls in love with another kid named Scout over the course of one glorious Brooklyn summer.  Unfortunately, Kid spent the previous summer head over heels for Felix, and after learning the painful lesson

The Secret  Scripture follows elderly mental patient Roseanne McNulty as she recounts the events that shaped her life during the Irish Civil War. At the start of the war, Roseanne is a beautiful young woman, full of curiosity and vivacity, who struggles with the inexorable forces of war, religion, gender imbalance and social upheaval.

This modern day fiction novel primarily takes place in the heart of the Amazon jungle.  After her colleague turns up dead, a second pharmaceutical company scientist is sent to Brazil to check on the progress of a fertility drug and to get more details on the death of her friend.

Sportswriter Joe Posnanski drove Buck O’Neil around America promoting the Negro Baseball Leagues at ball fields in rural towns and major league stadiums during the last year of O’Neil’s life.

Ayurveda unlocks the secrets of the centuries old Indian Ayrvedic therapy and its offshoots - Uanni, Siddha and Tibetan traditional medicine, the principal health systems of the Indian subcontinent.  It briefly describes many exotic Indian therapies and exotic Panchakarma treatments, but also p

One of the popular dystopian books of 2011, Shatter Me follows seventeen-year-old Juliette, an imprisoned teenager with a power so deadly that it terrifies even herself.  Juliette lives in a world destroyed by war and waste, and run by a regime called the Re-Establishment.  A fami

I picked this book out because of my enduring fascination with how the economic situation got to where it is today.  I’m a major tightwad…a saver against that inevitable rainy day, when I lose my job, my health, or my home.  Being rather fearful, I could never fully enjoy the benefits of the credit driven, leveraged pleasures of consumption.  (I still have