Brokaw, Tom. The Greatest Generation Random House, 1998Hardcover, 412 pagesISBN 0-375-50202-5 When my father-in-law died just about a year ago, I realized that it wouldn’t be long before everyone with personal experience of World War II would be gone. Even the youngest people who went off to that war are in their mid 70s now. So […]
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Woods, Stuart. The Run (2000) HarperCollins, 352 pages, $26.00 hardcover ISBN 0 06 019187 2 Just in time for the U.S. Presidential election comes The Run, a political thriller about a U.S. Senator’s campaign for the Presidency. Fortunately, the candidate is not Stone Barrington, but William Henry Lee, IV, of Georgia. A descendant of
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Woods, Stuart. Worst Fears Realized (1999) HarperCollins, 332 pages, $25.00 hard cover ISBN 0 06 019182 1 Stone Barrington is up to his usual activities. At the beginning of Worst Fears Realized, he picks up Susan Bean, a female attorney who was the assistant prosecutor on a recent high-profile case. Susan and Stone
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Paretsky, Sara. Hard Time (1999). Delacorte, 385 pages, $24.95 hardcover ISBN 0 385 31363 Whatever demons were haunting Sara Paretsky, she seems to have exorcised them in Ghost Country, for Hard Time brings back V.I. Warshawski in the author’s best novel yet. When Global Entertainment, a media conglomerate, purchases the Chicago Herald-Star, V.I. Warshawski’s long-time
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Paretsky, Sara. Ghost Country (1998) Delacorte, 386 pages, $24.95 hardcover ISBN 0 385 29933 8 I was very glad when Sara Paretsky finally proved wrong my fear (after reading Windy City Blues) that she might never publish again with the appearance of Ghost Country. Then I read the novel. Ghost Country starts off
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Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith Pantheon Books, 1999Hardcover, 275 pagesISBN 0-679-44240-5 I’m not a big fan of the poor-me-I-had-a-lousy-childhood school of memoir writing that’s so popular today, so when Lamott began her book with declarations of her childhood search for parental love, approval, and acceptance, and with acknowledgement of an abortion and drug
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Paretsky, Sara. Windy City Blues (1995)Delacorte When Windy City Blues, a collection of V.I. Warshawski short stories, came out, Sara Paretsky was in the midst of a prolonged and well publicized writing slump. After I read this book, my heart sank. I feared that we might never see another Paretsky book again. I imagined this
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Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work Carbondale, Ill., 1978Hardcover, 196 pagesISBN 0-8093-0883-5 Highly Recommended Rosenblatt is one of the proponents of the reader-response theory of literary criticism, a concept that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction to New Criticism, which treated
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Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) rpt. Warner, 1982, 281 pages, $6.99 paperbackISBN 0-446-31078-6 Highly Recommended The story takes place in rural Maycomb, Alabama, between the summer of 1933 and Halloween of 1935. In Part One the young narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, sets the stage for the main action by introducing us
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Grafton, Sue. “O” is for Outlaw (1999) Henry Holt and Company, 318 pages, $26.00 hardcover ISBN 0 8050 5955 5 In an introductory note Grafton explains to the reader that Kinsey Millhone time progresses at a slower pace than real time: “Since the books are sequential, Ms. Millhone is caught up in a
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