Reviews

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.

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."