Reviews

I picked up The Gorgeously Green Diet, because I enjoyed Sophie Uliano’s first book, Gorgeously Green: 8 Simple Steps to an Earth-friendly Life

First published in 1955, The Chrysalids is a terrific science fiction novel that is too often overlooked.

While this story of military and political machinations is interesting, it’s also a stereotypical man’s book. Jack Reacher lives by his own rules and answers to no one. He gets to have sex with a woman who offers herself to him with no investment on his part, doesn’t fawn over him, and holds no future expectations of him. And of course he solves the mystery, catches the bad guys, and gets…uh, I mean, discards the girl.

Child’s intended audience is obvious, and it’s not me.

We’ll always have “Paris, Texas.”

I don’t know about you, but when I think of early novels the books that come to mind include Cervantes’s Don Quixote or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  Boy was I wrong. 

MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND is Helen Simonson's debut novel.  Most of the story takes place in the picturesque, yet contemporary, English town of Edgecombe St.

In 1986, when Mark Twain was 31, he took a voyage on a great steam ship to Hawaii, where he spent four months as a foreign correspondent. He wrote 25 newspaper dispatches on the colorful history of old Hawaii, then called the Sandwich Islands. With his trademark sense of humor and superb style, Twain describes his adventures and cultural observations of daily life on the islands, while attending legislative sessions, hula shows and a poi cooking and tasting.

Ubuntu is a philosophy and principle of ethics rooted in African culture, similar to our Golden Rule. This book describes the story of an African student who introduced this concept to an American businessman. After explaining the history and the main principles of Ubuntu, the book focuses mainly on its application and benefits in a work environment and on personal reflection. Fundamentally, the philosophy focuses on people's allegiances and relations with each other and their sense of belonging to a greater whole.