Personal Days by Ed Park

Personal Days is a clever satire of office politics in the New York office of a company that’s shrinking under the influence of “The Californians” that bought the company and now run the show. The erratic and sometimes cruel path of the layoffs will sound familiar to anyone who’s lived through them. There’s a twist, [...]

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

Dear American Airlines starts like a rant against the airlines but is, in fact, a no-longer-young man’s regrets about losing his daugher (and more) to drinking too much. Bennie Ford sits at O’Hare when he should be flying to his daughter’s wedding (to another woman), a daughter he has not seen since toddlerhood but whom [...]

The Pixar Touch by David Price

The Pixar Touch describes the rise of Pixar as a leader in the world of animated movies, ending with the Disney purchase of the company. The book is at its best at the beginning, when Pixar emerges as a company making… computer hardware! Who knew? The descriptions of the early years with unclear goals, massive work [...]

Home by Julie Andrews

Home: A Memoir of My Early Years is the story of Julie Andrews’ childhood and young adulthood — until she becomes famous. Born to an unstable mom who soon divorces her wonderful dad (or perhaps not-dad, but wonderful anyway), Julie Andrews tells about living through the London Blitz, haphazard theater bookings throughout the English countryside, [...]

The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander Mccall Smith

The Miracle at Speedy Motors is the ninth installment in the series of the Number 1 Ladies Detective Agencyand Mma Ramotswe is back for more mystery-solving, although we all know by now that solving mysteries is not the point of these books. The point is to be back in Botswana, with a traditional-size woman who [...]

The Crowd Sounds Happy by David Dawidoff

The Crowd Sounds Happy is a memoir of a happy childhood, albeit with a mentally-ill father and a financially struggling mother. The author describes how his mother sends him to a posh, good private school where he feels he doesn’t quite belong with his rich classmates — and repeatedly hurst his mother by wanting much [...]

Buying In by Rob Walker

Buying In talks about Marketing  2.0: what happens when marketeers no longer can or want to use standard advertizing and promotion techniques and instead highjack consumers’ counter-brand ideology to push their brands. Yes, big business can cleverly exploit the very elitistism of counterculture — and the author supplies a number of examples, all taken from [...]

The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan

The Middle Place is a memoir by a Bay Area woman who got breast cancer at age 36, and whose beloved father got bladder cancer about the same time. Talk about rotten luck. But the book is not about that, not really: it’s about the fantastic strength she got from her adoring and wonderful father, [...]

Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey

Bright Shiny Morning is an official piece of fiction, unlike A Million Little PIeces by the same author that started out as a memoir and turned out to be fiction after all… and a great piece of fiction in my mind so why did it have to be misrepresented?
Bright Shiny Morning is not that great. [...]

Final Salute by Jim Sheeler

Prepare for an emotional experience when you read Final Salute, a carefully crafted description of a very tough job, that of the Marines who notify the families of deaths in combat, and who take care of those families through funerals and beyond. Perhaps the members of Congress who voted for the Iraq war should read this [...]