To liven things up I decided to designate a book of the month well, each month, and to choose a book of the quarter each quarter, starting right now. As I surveyed the books reviewed this month I found an immediate problem: there’s more than one book I really, really loved this month. So I [...]
Entries from May 2009
May 30, 2009
Vanished Smile by R.A. Scotti
In August 1911 the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris. Vanished Smile recalls the theft, police investigation, and eventual recovery of the painting from the Italian thief who thought he would become a national hero by returning the painting to Da Vinci’s homeland. (He miscalculated!)
The story recalls The Gardner Heist for [...]
May 29, 2009
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
The 19th Wife tells two stories: one is a historical novel about Ann Eliza Young, the 19th wife (probably more like the 50th++ wife) of the Mormon leader Brigham Young, who decided to leave him and speak against polygamy; the other is about a young gay ex-fundamentalist Mormon trying to get his mother, also a [...]
May 28, 2009
The Piano Teacher by Janice Lee
The Piano Teacher is a double story based in Hong Kong of a piano teacher’s affair that uncovers the complicated goings-on of the Hong-Kong elite during the Japanese occupation in World War II, ten years before. The many characters, some English expatriates and some local Hong Kong residents, can be caricatures: there’s a couple of [...]
May 27, 2009
Closing Time by Joe Queenan
Closing Time is a memoir that reads like a novel of a tough childhood, growing up with an alcoholic father who beat his children (often and hard), who could not hold on to a job, and who made a number of questionable decisions, some told hilariously like the time he decided to “drive” his delivery [...]
May 26, 2009
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Like many other books before it (e.g. Nudge, Predictably Irrational, Sway), How We Decide tackles why and how we make decisions. It has the best opening story of the lot, about landing an airplane with an engine on fire and quotes many airplane and non-airplane stories later in the book, some familiar from other books [...]
May 25, 2009
Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies
Happens Every Day is the memoir of a doomed marriage, as told by the wife who, after giving up her job as an actress to follow her academic husband to Oberlin College where he got a tenure-track job and becoming a stay-home mom for their two young sons, finds the marriage ending abruptly when the [...]
May 23, 2009
Where are you now? by Mary Higgins Clark
Where Are You Now? is a creepy tale of a young man who abruptly disappeared years ago but calls faithfully each Mother’s Day. When his sister decides to investigate his disappearance young women turn up dead or missing and her brother appears to be the culprit, causing her mother to bemoan this new twist, but [...]
May 22, 2009
Herland by Charlotte Gilman
Herland’s subtitle is “A lost Feminist Utopian Novel” and the story is indeed contrived: three would-be explorers, men, find a small country hidden away in the mountains that is populated only by women (who apparently reproduce through parthenogenesis, one of the many unbelievable feature of the story.) they are welcome but keep imprisoned by the [...]
May 21, 2009
Cracking Cases by Henry Lee
Cracking Cases recalls five murder cases (including the OJ Simpson trial) that the author helped solve, or disprove, using forensic evidence. Alas, like Teasing Secrets from the Dead and How Not to Die, recently reviewed on this blog, Cracking Cases heavily underscores the heavy burden of forensics experts (missing Christmas dinner, missing Thanksgiving, in such [...]
