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Sunday Reading

Written on: May 17th, 2010 by: in Blog Posts

Scott Turow’s long awaited new legal thriller Innocent leads the reviews in today’s New York Times. This new book, “a meticulously constructed and superbly paced mystery”, is a follow up to Turow’s debut work Presumed Innocent and features judge Rusty Sabich making the same mistakes he made almost 25 years ago. However, it’s more than old wine in new bottles- it’s “lovely…gripping and darkly self-reflective” with all of the procedural and technical bells and whistles that the CSI generation have come to expect along with Turow’s love of the law and his crafty literary style.

There’s a wealth of reviews from genre to non-fiction in this week’s reviews. Once again, readers will be spoiled for choice and their Delaware public library can deliver the goods:

• War by Sebastian Junger recounts his months embedded with U.S. infantry in Afghanistan’s Korangol Valley, one of the most hostile and dangerous places in the America’s war zone. Junger is mostly uninterested in strategy, politics and history in this work, a sympathetic and emotionally resonant portrayal of the American warrior and “a discourse on the nature of war itself.”
• Roddy Doyle’s The Dead Republic is one that I’ve been cautiously waiting for. This concludes a sequel that began with the incredible A Star Called Henry, one of the best books written about the world’s greatest revolution, the Easter Rising of 1916. I found the sequel very disappointing, however- so I’m nervously waiting for my chance to read this concluding work in which Henry Smart returns from self-imposed exile in America to confront the new troubles of his homeland.
• Diane Ravich has received a lot of media attention for her passionate work on American schools, The Death and Life of the American School System. Once a passionate conservative advocate of choice and testing in schools, Ravich has written a devastating critique of the charter movement, education vouchers, and holding schools accountable through testing.
• Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer is a “singular riff on steampunk”- the sci-fi genre that imagines a future based on Victorian-era technology- which retells Shakespeare’s Tempest aboard a stranded dirigible.