Paul’s Book Reviews: Vietnam, Old School SF, Radio Days, Tough Guys, Ghost Stories

“Page took the record that was playing on the turntable off without asking anybody and put on Jimi Hendrix: long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain, shaking his head so […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

“like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a funhouse—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.” – James Hannaham, “Delicious Foods”   Delicious Foods James Hannaham Seems like everyone wants to talk about the most interesting character in the book: Scotty, the personified voice […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Memoir, Essays, Fiction

“Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air. Mountain ranges, no longer seen in profile, dwarf to anthills; seas lose their horizons; lakes have no longer depth but look like bright pennies on the earth’s surface; forests become a thin impermanent film, a moss on […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

“People tend to think of military science as strategy and weapons—fighting, bombing, advancing. All that I leave to the memoir writers and historians. I’m interested in the parts no one makes movies about—not the killing but the keeping alive.” — Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

“There’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself.” —Jonathan Franzen, Purity     Purity Jonathan Franzen People I follow on social media no longer like Jonathan Franzen. He must have said something […]

Paul’s Book Reviews

“The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that—as a minister at odds with the crisis noted—extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.” — Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 Devotion: An Epic Story of Heroism, Friendship, and Sacrifice Adam Makos I thought Devotion an excellent book: a true story, well […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Horror/Fantasy, Nonfiction, Science Fiction

“People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.” — David Mitchell, Slade House Slade House David Mitchell Slade House is a companion (not exactly a sequel) to Mitchell’s previous novel The Bone Clocks, but it is a more compact and to-the-point story, as readable as anything Mitchell has written. Like […]