The second half of Andre Norton’s 1969 Uncharted Stars is a fast-paced chase that is one of the best extended sequences in her 200+ books. This is the section that has to do with zero stones that have great power and something to do with earlier...
Some of Andre Norton’s fans consider The Zero Stone, published in 1968, to be one of her best books. I didn’t find it all that compelling although it is distinctive in a couple ways. First, this is the first Norton novel that I’ve read which is...
Shea Serrano’s Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated is a bag-of-potato-chips sort of book. No, that’s not quite right. It’s the book equivalent of seven or eight bags of over-salted, over-flavored...
In the Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus takes a trip to Hades where he encounters many of his former comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles who asks him: “How could you endure to come down here to Hades’ place, where the senseless dead men...
Daniel Okrent’s newly published The Guarded Gate is about immigration. But, much more, its subject is racism. Not black/white racism although that does rear its ugly head in Okrent’s rigorously researched, niftily written and maddening book. No...
As a world leader, Empress Dowager Cixi hasn’t had good press, nothing like, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria. In terms of historical reputation, those women had their gender working against them but somehow found ways to be loved or, at...
I’m hoping for a 2020 that’s OK. That’s all. I’m not looking for an excellent year. Or a super-duper year. Or the Best. Year. Ever. Just an OK year. Which is what I’ll probably get. And what you’ll probably get, too. OK is OK We live in...
The best books of 2019 Moby Dick by Herman Melville Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois Job: A New Translation by Edward L. Greenstein...
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