Facebook  Twitter  Pinterest  Flickr  Google+  YouTube  Instagram

Sunday Reviews

Written on: November 1st, 2010 in Blog Posts

As ever, this week’s Sunday book reviews showcased a number of fascinating-looking titles, available from your local public library:

• Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia is an exploration of Russia’s vast wilderness, and “an uproarious, sometimes dark yarn filled with dubious meals, broken-down vehicles, abandoned slave-labor camps and ubiquitous statues of Lenin.”
• Grant Wood: A Life is a new major biography of the iconic American artist, and delves deeper into his tortured private life than previous studies.
• In Susan Straight’s Take One Candle, Light a Room characters “teeter among vivid scenes of poverty” in the author’s fictional exploration of how degradation and desparation shapes their fate.
• Bruce Machart’s Wake of Forgiveness is an impressive first novel set in the waning ‘Wild’ West.
• In Adam and Eve by Sena Naslund, monotheist fundamentalists pursue a woman who has discovered proof of extraterrestrial life, in a crazed attempt to preserve the foundations of their beliefs. The reviewer found it “suprisingly affecting”- but mostly because of its weirdness.
• C.J. Chivers history of the AK-47 assault rifle- The Gun – charts that weapon’s rise to ascendancy in the global arms race, and the 60-year story of the “model T of assault weapons.”