To make a reckoning: How Good Is Your Chess? is an enjoyable and challenging collection of chess puzzles. The solutions are generally accurate and Evans’ comments are often instructive. Working through the book and making at stab at solving the positions will undoubtedly help you improve as a chess player.
A review of A Mirror in the Road by Morris Dickstein
If you chart Dickstein’s emphases as a line graph, you will find that it spikes sharply upward at certain authors. Although he sees Joyce, Mann, and Kafka as the dominant modernists, he writes relatively little about the first two compared to what he writes about Kafka. Joyce is too knotty a problem to be dealt with in a book that has many other considerations.
A review of The PK Man by Jeffrey Mishlove
The question remains, is the mind of the agent for psychokinesis creating these events, or merely becoming receptive to their existence? In this way the book is about the unexplored nature and potential of human consciousness, and how it might exist, co-exist and interact with physical matter.
A review of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
He has an engaging readiness to gossip. His portraits, largely unfriendly, of Nicholas Nabokov and Theodor Adorno are skilful and have a hint of venom. In other contexts, he is equally gifted at bringing to life the relations, often troubled, of the musical giants of the past century. He presents many incidents that explain much about the musical developments of the period. Some of these are far from edifying – and often all the more amusing for that.
A review of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
In some ways it is like a very interesting first installment to a longer story. Although this disappoints one’s conventional longings for a neat fictional package, it is on more sophisticated grounds eminently satisfactory. This, the eighth book by Cameron, is an accomplishment that provides an irresistible blend of the moving and the witty.
A Review of 10 Steps to Creating Memorable Characters by Sue Viders, Lucynda Storey, Cher Gorman, Becky Martinez
Reviewed by Magdalena Ball 10 Steps to Creating Memorable Characters A Writer’s Workbook by Sue Viders, Lucynda Storey, Cher Gorman, Becky Martinez Lone Eagle Paperback: 176 pages, November 2006, ISBN: 978-1580650687, 1580650686 The great agent and author Noah Lukeman states…
A review of The River Baptists by Belinda Castles
Castles creates mood skilfully, as in the opening chapter where Danny and his father are fishing in their little boat. The blood on his father’s t-shirt from the worms and other creatures is symbolic of the man and his relationship with his family. The details of the community and the people who live there produce a sleepiness that is tinged with menace. There is much that moves under the surface of the water, occasionally bursting out to wreck havoc.
A review of The Court Poetry of Chaucer by James Dempsey
With the original easily available, the reader can with only slight adjustment connect to the original. If Dempsey’s version is a crutch, it is a comfortable and useful one. The versification is consistent and its occasional use of phrases with a modern topical allusions is amusing, a kind of sly wit that Chaucer would appreciate.
A review of Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
To read Paradiso by itself is a novel experience and well worth the special attention that it requires. This translation is exceptional and among so many stands out as particularly splendid and true.
A review of: Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean by Douglas Wolk
Overall, Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean is a book that is subtle, stimulating and enjoyable to read. It is certain to deepen your appreciation of what is a still-emerging medium (as Wolk says, “The Golden Age [of Comics] is Right Now”).