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Category Archives: books
Review of Gabriel Tallent's "My Absolute Darling" in the Dallas Morning News
So my review of Gabriel Tallent’s debut novel, My Absolute Darling, appears in the Dallas Morning News today, and can be found here. The marketing of this novel seems odd: The combination of its sweet title, the brightly colored branches … Continue reading
Posted in books, The West
Tagged Book Reviewing, Gabriel Tallent's My Absolute Darling, The West
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Hurricane Harvey Hits Home Town, Like I Predicted in "Goodnight, Texas"
So my misspent years in high school were dithered away in the Texas coastal town of Rockport, which appears to have been the epicenter of Hurricane Harvey’s landfall last night. Back in 2006 Unbridled Books published my novel Goodnight, Texas … Continue reading
Posted in books, books/film, Climate Change, The West
Tagged Climate Change, Fiction Writing, Goodnight, Texas, The Bird Saviors, The West
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Guest Blog Post on the Superstition Review Website
So the nice editors over at the Superstition Review have not only published several of my stories and a recent essay—on stuffed animals, of all things—but they have also asked that I write a guest blog post for them, which … Continue reading
Posted in books, books/film, Cormac McCarthy, writing
Tagged Book Reviewing, Cormac McCarthy, Fiction Writing, Good Fiction, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
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Review of Jack E. Davis's "The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea" in the Dallas Morning News
So last Sunday my review of Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea appeared in the Dallas Morning News, and can be found here. It’s a terrific book about the Gulf of Mexico, on the shores … Continue reading
O Gulag, My Gulag: On Daniel Beer's "The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars"
So I’m a sucker for Russian literature, and while I was recently reading a biography of Leo Tolstoy written by his daughter—Alexandra Tolstoy’s The Life of My Father (1953)—I had to set it down when I heard about this just-out … Continue reading
The Goodwill Genius: On Discovering Vladimir Nabokov's "Bend Sinister"
So back in December my editor at the Dallas Morning News asked me (and other contributing writers) to pen a brief essay about a book I’d been given as a gift some time in my life, and I actually wrote … Continue reading
On Adventures Gone Wrong: Stephane Gerson's "Disaster Falls" and Jason Kersten's "Journal of the Dead"
So I stumbled upon a book that touches close to home for me, as a naturalist who drags his young daughter with him to various outdoor locales seething with both beauty and danger, filled with the confidence and aplomb that … Continue reading
"The Altered States of Stuffed Animals" in The Superstition Review
So I have an essay titled “The Altered States of Stuffed Animals” published in the latest issue of The Superstition Review, which can be located here. I have a fondness for TSR, as they have published some of my work … Continue reading
On T.J. Stiles's "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America": a Pulitzer That Deserves It
So I’ve been a fan of both (the celebrated myth of) George Armstrong Custer and the excellent historian/biographer T.J. Stiles for many years, and when these two worlds collided, it’s not surprising that I read Custer’s Trials: A Life on … Continue reading
Posted in books, books/film, The West
Tagged Book Reviewing, Custer's Trials, Film, George Armstrong Custer, T.J. Stiles, The West
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On Sonia Shah's "Pandemic" and Antarctica's Looming Meltdown: Drowning in a Sea Full of Germs
So a few years back I often wrote about Climate Change and its slo-mo catastrophe, especially when it seemed that we had the chance to alter our Titanic-like course toward that (melting) iceberg, but of late I’ve been more reticent, … Continue reading
Posted in Birding, books, books/film, Climate Change, Uncategorized
Tagged Book Reviewing, Climate Change, David Quammen's Spillover, Gwyneth Paltrow, Horror Movies, Sonia Shah's Pandemic, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, The Bird Saviors, The Great Influenza, The Great Mortality, Viruses
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