Book Reviews

It’s midway through the 1961 major league baseball season, and Jim Brosnan, a right-handed relief pitcher of the Cincinnati Reds, is talking with Joey Jay, the staff ace, about when [...]

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a sad, bleak book about a man who finds near the end of his life that he has wasted it. On [...]

I'm not sure how Elmore Leonard's Hombre, published in 1961, reads for a young person today. It seems to me that there is something universal to it that would make [...]

Sorrow Road is Julia Keller’s fifth novel set in fictional Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, and centered on the county prosecutor Belfa Elkins. If you want to get a sense of [...]

Reading George Wallace’s collection of 48 poems A Simple Blues with a Few Intangibles is a kaleidoscopic, whirligig experience. It is a rushing, often breathless torrent of images, allusions, emotions, [...]

Science fiction seems to be about the future, and, a lot of times, it is. Writers will grapple with the nuts and bolts of how a spacecraft might be constructed [...]

Christopher Moore’s 2005 novel The Stupidest Angel tells the story of one extremely clueless — albeit extremely powerful — angel who visits the California coastal community of Pine Cove to [...]

Jim Brosnan's books about two years in his life as a baseball player --- The Long Season, published in 1960) and Pennant Race (1962) --- were the first and last [...]

Talk about Shakespeare’s great King Lear tends to focus on the action of the play and its meaning. A self-satisfied monarch, blind to the consequences of his actions, splits his [...]

John Boyne’s 2015 novel A History of Loneliness was a difficult book for me to read, mainly because it deals with the crimes of hundreds of pedophile priests who preyed [...]