How do you review a non-fiction classic that generations of students and scholars have read, reread, studied and critiqued? Perhaps by looking at what it still says to us in times of individual and societal crises. Writing in 1946 following his liberation, Frankl begins with a personal account of his struggle to survive a series … Read more
Winner of four Hugo awards for best novel, Lois McMaster Bujold never disappoints. Having read Cryoburn, the most recent of her fourteen-book Vorkosigan saga, I decided to go back to the beginning. When I found the second installment, Barrayar, I read it immediately. Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan finds herself, to borrow from Robert Heinlein, a stranger … Read more
In Last Gleaming – Love and Death in the Time of Pandemic, William Wakefield, whom Parker’s readers will remember from Pronounced Ponce, is now a college freshman. He meets and falls in love with Misty Sax, whom we met in Fly Away. William is pursuing his dreams of becoming a journalist. With help from his … Read more
Published in 2019, Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers couldn’t be timelier. Gladwell opens with the case of Sandra Bland, a young African American woman pulled over by a white police officer in a small Texas town in July 2015. Supposedly, she fails to signal a lane change. What begins as a routine traffic stop quickly … Read more