Leningrad was not a funny place to be during the German’s siege on the city in World War II. When you are starving, hunting rats for dinner, and nibbling small rations of rock-hard “bread,” there is little room for joking around. Somehow though, and without forcing it, author David Benioff mixes humor and brutal reality [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Book Reviews'
City of Thieves by David Benioff
December 8th, 2009 No Comments
Tags: Book Reviews · City of Thieves · David Benioff · Llalan
What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
November 30th, 2009 1 Comment
Noted Emerson alumna, Laura van den Berg released in October her first collection of short stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. Beautiful and sad, her stories span the globe, from Madagascar to Chicago to Inverness, in search of wonder, love, and acceptance. Her voice is clean, the prose [...]
Tags: alumni · Book Reviews · Katherine · Laura van den Berg · What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
Boston Book Fest: R. Sikoryak
October 25th, 2009 No Comments
I’ve decided I have a new cartoonist crush: R. Sikoryak. His latest book is Masterpiece Comics, which is, in the parlance of the modern DJ, a mashup of classic comics and even classic-ier literature. What happens when Blondie eats the Fruit of Knowledge? When Bazooka Joe enters Dante’s Inferno? When [...]
Tags: Boston Book Festival · Bridget · comics
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
September 22nd, 2009 No Comments
Many a day around seven pm I look in my empty kitchen cabinets and wish pasta al a carbonara would start raining from the skies. No hassle of cooking, no tipping the delivery guy–just spaghetti from heaven. I’m sure I’m not the only one in this gravy boat.
It sounds like a tall tale, I know, [...]
Tags: Book Reviews · children's books · Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs · Llalan · Reading Rainbow
When You First Find Yourself in a Book
September 21st, 2009 1 Comment
This book, pages yellowed, dog-eared, now laying on my desk, was my first Great Read—the original favorite book.
Tags: children's books · Chris · Lloyd Alexander · Reading Rainbow · The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen
The New Valley by Josh Weil
August 6th, 2009 No Comments
That a collection of three novellas was published at all, let alone by a new author who then received high praise and numerous glowing reviews, is an event worth writing about. Josh Weil’s The New Valley is an impressive anomaly. But how does one write about novellas? Yeah, yeah: like a novel only shorter. I [...]
Tags: Book Reviews · Josh Weil · Llalan · The New Valley
Mapping Happiness: The Geography of Bliss
July 10th, 2009 No Comments
Just to be fair, I should confess: travel literature is definitely not my genre of expertise. So I trusted the tastes of the Globe Corner Bookstore employees when I chose The Geography of Bliss, a charming and perplexing book about traveling to the world’s happiest countries in the hopes of arriving at an enlightened understanding [...]
Tags: Book Reviews · Geography of Bliss · kim · Travel Week
Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon
July 8th, 2009 No Comments
“I took to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.” And such is the reasoning behind Blue Highways, a travelogue of a man and his van, traveling around the perimeter of the United States solely on backroads, no federal highways allowed. [...]
Tags: Blue Highways · Book Reviews · Least Heat-Moon · Llalan · Travel Week · travel writing
Summer Running Month: a search for discipline
June 30th, 2009 No Comments
In my ideal-world fantasy, I imagined that the day after I graduated from Emerson with my MFA in Creative Writing, I would wake up, pick up a pen, and start spouting well-polished prose. In actuality, I went to a job interview at the restaurant where I now work, went out to lunch with my mother, [...]
Tags: emerson alums · Haruki Murakami · John Bingham · kim · Summer Reading Month · writing habits
The Numerati: Building the ‘Matrix’ of Marketing
June 14th, 2009 No Comments
Numbers geek? Conspiracy theorist? Progressive Web 2.0 entrepreneur? If these come even close to describing you, you shouldn’t be without a personal copy of Stephen Baker’s The Numerati (Houghton-Mifflin hardcover, 2008).
Tags: Book Reviews · Chris · data · Houghton Mifflin · nonfiction · numerati · Stephen Baker
