Book Reviews

So, NHL players and owners appear to have a new collective bargaining agreement that will end the lock out that cost them last season. YAWN. Instead of worrying about a league few really seemed to miss as it committed hari-kari, maybe it’s worth taking a look at people who aren’t …

We could call this summer Men In Black 3 or the Birth of Mask ...

It takes a bit to get used to James Frey’s memoirs, both typographically and stylistically. None of the paragraphs are indented. Quotation marks are not used to delineate speech or conversation. Stylistically, Frey would probably flunk most basic composition classes. Many of his sentences are basically run-on streams of consciousness. …

"...New York is boring. It’s like Gone With The Wind on mescaline down here..."

True “dog people” are considered such because they think so highly of the canine. Not only do they consider their dog almost as much a part of the family as the children, they tend to respect a dog’s patience, tolerance and unqualified devotion. I know because I’m one of them. …

Some journalism doesn’t fit the inherent constraints of newspapers or magazines. Often, that is because the subject is too massive and requires longer periods of investigation than what these formats tend to demand in immediacy. Terry McDermott’s exploration of the 9/11 terrorists, Perfect Soldiers, is an example of this. McDermott, …

I went to North Korea in 1998 and it was, and no doubt still is, a most fascinating, if spooky, place.

Literary types like to dismiss genre fiction, yet judging by the number of novels that are near- (or far-)misses, a detective novel is as difficult to write well as any other.

Mal. Zoe. Jayne. Wash. Inara. Simon. River. Kaylee. Shepherd Book. Serenity. If those 10 names don’t leave you shaking your head at the stupidity of FOX Network executives, Finding Serenity isn’t the book for you. Finding Serenity is a collection of essays exploring the short lived FOX Television series Firefly. …

There probably isn’t a middle ground on Terry Jones’s views of the “war on terror.” You either agree with him or you don’t. Yet even if you do, Terry Jones’s War on the War on Terror comes off more as toss-off than lasting political commentary. Jones, whose biggest but not …