Reviews

Early on in Thomas Tull's documentary about three of rock 'n' roll's seminal guitarists, the White Stripes' Jack White gives his humorous prediction of what will happen when he meets up with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and U2's The Edge. Says White: "We'll probably get in a fistfight."

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors, as I’ve read the majority of his books. Written in 1998, this book also was not a disappointment. It’s a travelogue following Bryson and his out of shape friend, Stephen Katz, as they attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail.

As author Ande Parks points out in his afterword, Capote in Kansas is not entirely factual.

When it was first released, I asked my husband to go to the theater with me to see Amelia. He said, ‘no’. I tried to bribe him with a big bag of buttered popcorn but that didn’t work.

George Mann's Ghosts of Manhattan is, like the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, not a brilliant piece of work, but it's so enthusiastically done, I couldn't helped by be charmed and entertained by it.

"Blood on the Tracks" isn't the best album of Bob Dylan's long, sinuous career. It's also far from the worst, and with the passing years, this mid-1970s effort seems to have acquired more musical and intellectual heft.

True, there may be some rather slight songs here, including "You're a Big Girl Now" and "Buckets of Rain" -- but only if measured against Dylan warhorses such as "Positively 4th Street" or "Like a Rolling Stone."

Another mystery with dark humor, Benacquista has offered up something quite different from his previous book, Framed, takes place in the Paris art world.

Jim Harrison considers himself a poet first and a fiction writer second. Maybe that’s part of the reason his novels and novellas read so well: He has a poet’s gift for elevated language coupled with the heart of a storyteller.

Before heading straight to the self-help books when you come to the library looking for psychological insight, be aware that reading fiction can also have strong therapeutic benefits. One example to check out is Laura Moriarty’s The Rest of Her Life. Moriarty received a degree in social work from KU, which is excellent training for the themes she explores in her novel: social status and crime, parent/child relationships, and cyclical family dynamics.

Translated from Spanish, this tale was written for readers who enjoy “living” in a novel by getting into the skins of the characters and following their relationships through joy and travail. The story begins in 1945 Barcelona following the Spanish Civil War – and the atmosphere of the city almost becomes a character in itself.