Category: Book Report

I’ve been meaning to give Brundibar a good look since it was published. A new Maurice Sendak book is an event, and a reason for hope for the world, and this book being a collaboration with Tony Kushner to retell…

Your Humble Blogger is, you know, and old left-winger and news junkie, and back in the day, I used to watch The McLaughlin Group. When I was 22 or so, it seemed like I was finding stuff out by watching;…

Your Humble Blogger came across the Wimsey Papers a while ago. I hadn’t known that Jill Paton Walsh had used them as a jumping-off point for her Peter Wimsey book A Presumption of Death. The book is … well, do…

As it happens, YHB was in the middle of reading Coyote when I noticed Ian Frazier’s collection Coyote v. Acme on the shelf in the children’s room of the local library. Now, CvA happens to have in it, in addition…

As it turns out, I was suckered into reading Allen Steele’s Coyote, which I thought was a novel (what with it saying novel on the cover) but is actually one of those series-of-short-stories things. Oh, and I’d already read one…

Catch-22 is my usual example of a perfect book, that is, a book that couldn’t possibly be any better without being a good deal worse. I can’t say much more about it at present, as I don’t want to get…

There’ll be no butter in hell! chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,-Vardibidian….

Metropolis, by Elizabeth Gaffney, was a gift. Now, here are my criteria for a good gift. Ideally, a gift should be something that the recipient would not buy for him- (or her-) self. It should be something that the giver…

I don’t know exactly where James Thurber lived around here, but it was clearly around here. As I was reading through Let Your Mind Alone I couldn’t help noticing the local color. In fact, when at one point he describes…

Well, and Your Humble Blogger has finally got around to reading the full text of On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, and frankly, the irony must be pointed out. Mr. Frankfurt has done no serious research into the history of…