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Recent Posts
- On Randall K. Wilson’s “A Place Called Yellowstone”: Award-Winning History of Yellowstone National Park
- On Candice Millard’s “River of Doubt” and “River of the Gods”: Bugs, Snakes, and Disease Aplenty
- More Alone than “Alone”: On Adam Shoalts’s “Vanished Beyond the Map: The Mystery of Lost Explorer Hubert Darrell” (2025)
- Rachel McAdams film “Send Help” (2026) Makes Comic Gold Out of “Survivor” and “Alone” Audition Videos
- “The Wiggle Room”: A Short Story
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Tag Archives: Book Reviewing
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
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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Review of Dominic Smith's "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" in the Dallas Morning News
So interested readers can find my review of Dominic Smith’s novel The Last Painting of Sara de Vos in today’s Dallas Morning News here. I liked the book: quiet and understated. I don’t really know anything about Smith, though I … Continue reading
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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They Eat Horses, Don't They? "The Revenant" v. "Backcountry": A Tale of Two Bears, With Nods to Peter Stark's "Astoria" and David Roberts's "A Newer World"
So I’ve been getting caught up on some of the Oscar-bait for this year, as in watching Matt Damon’s improbable space rescue in The Martian, and seeing The Revenant in a local theater, where I laughed and made too many … Continue reading
Posted in Bears, books/film, Cormac McCarthy, The West
Tagged Backcountry, Book Reviewing, Cormac McCarthy, Fiction Writing, the film, The Revenant, The West
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