Category Archives: Uncategorized

On Adam Haslett's "Union Atlantic"

Here’s the url to my review of Adam Haslett’s novel, Union Atlantic, which appears in the Dallas Morning News today. It’s a fast-paced read, a tale of creepy bankers, of which there seems to be no shortage in these times: … Continue reading

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"Paranormal (In)Activity" = "Blair Witch" + "The Amityville Horror"

So I’m always suspicious (being at heart a Smartass Skeptic) of movie blurbs and call-out quotes, but several people had told me how “scary” Paranormal Activity was, and I was home late, wanting a movie to escape into a scary … Continue reading

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Review of Matthew Flaming's "The Kingdom of Ohio"

I actually had two reviews appear on Sunday, one in Pennsylvania and one in Texas. I feel like I’m going coast-to-coast, almost. This one is about Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio, which appeared in the Dallas Morning News. As … Continue reading

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Review of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon"

This review appeared in print yesterday. I did it as a favor for a Centre County Reads project, that chose Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as their 2010 book. It’s a hardboiled, gin-joint read, fun in part to glimpse the … Continue reading

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On a Life Less Online, or Snubbing the Gadget Age

So I was offline for almost a month, spending the holidays in Colorado, no landline phone, no Wifi, no email, no mornings spent perusing The Daily Mail or any other mildly amusing waste of time. The air tasted cleaner. I … Continue reading

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Cormac McCarthy in the Wall Street Journal

So this is the best McCarthy interview I’ve ever read, more revealing than the one he did years ago in the New York Times to promote All the Pretty Horses: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html I like this quote: “I have a great sympathy … Continue reading

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A Headless Corpse in the Heartland

Postcards from the Heartland: My second home (but first in my heart) lies in Custer County, Colorado, near the town of Westcliffe in a remote and lovely valley between two mountain ridges, the Sangre de Cristo and the Wet Mountains, … Continue reading

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Cormac McCarthy's Typewriter and Other Stories

Some nuggets of interest (such as that he has three unpublished book mss) in this NY Times piece about Cormac McCarthy donating his typewriter for auction.  UPDATE: The typewriter sold for over ten times its estimated value, at $254K:

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On Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy" and the Downside of Globalization

I’ve had Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (2007) on my bookshelf for a year and now that I’ve finally got around to reading it, I regret the long delay. In a sea of admirable but gloomy titles, such as McKibben’s own … Continue reading

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Fighting Off the Facebook Empire Tentacles

So I haven’t been posting much lately, my time being usurped with building a wicked TinkerToy airplane for my daughter and finishing a novel that seems unending, but here’s a recent struggle with the encroaching social network world: A couple … Continue reading

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