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Recent Posts
- Aliens Among Us: Probing Hillbillies and Freaking Shut-ins, How Netflix’s “Encounters” and Hulu’s “No One Will Save You” Prep Us for the Coming Alien Apocalypse, Kind of
- My Life as a Bob Odenkirk Character: On How Watching Netflix’s Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful” Mimicked My Experience of Watching the AMC series Lucky Hank
- “Bobcats, Bobcats, Bobcats”: Animal Life and a Tribute to “Modern Family”
- “The North Water”: This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Moby Dick
- Day 25: On David Quammen's "Spillover": Terrific Book That Foretold Our Pandemic, Kind of
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Tag Archives: Book Reviewing
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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On Charles Murray's "Coming Apart" and the Recent Middlebury College Brouhaha, from a Liberal Who Has Actually Read His Books
So I’ve followed with some interest (and some dismay) the recent brouhaha about Charles Murray’s visit to Middlebury College, that was interrupted by a student demonstration that got out of hand—labeled a “riot” by some media and commentators—and in which … Continue reading
On the Film Version of Dave Eggers's "The Circle" and a Nod to Cormac McCarthy's Essay "The Kekule Problem: Where Did Language Come From?": From the Ridiculous to the Sublime
So I’m not in the habit of beating dead horses (though I did once write a scene in which a couple got romantic while leaning up against one, but that’s a different story), and I don’t bother to review or … Continue reading
Posted in Art, Bad TV, Bears, books/film, Cormac McCarthy
Tagged Book Reviewing, Dave Egger's The Circle, Fiction Writing, Millennials, The Circle film version, The West
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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
On the Film Version of Kobo Abe's novel "Woman in the Dunes" & the Passing of Robert Osborne
So I’m sorry to say I just heard the news that the great emcee of Turner Classic Movies, Robert Osborne, has passed away at the age of eighty-four. He was like the Walter Cronkite of Old Hollywood classics. He always … 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 Sailor's Gift": Short Essay in the Dallas Morning News
So as I noted in my previous post (The Goodwill Genius: On Discovering Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister) I actually wrote the “wrong” essay for my editor at the Dallas Morning News, remembering it only to be about a book that … 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
On Ian McGuire's "The North Water": a Revisionist "Moby Dick," With Echoes of "Blood Meridian" and "The Revenant"
So last week I had the gripping-if-ghastly reading experience of zooming through Ian McGuire’s new novel, The North Water. I’ll try to be circumspect in my comments here so as not to spoil the reading “fun” for others, as I … Continue reading