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A Reader's reviews
| My Reviews - Page 1 of 4 |
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-08-23 01:17:06 for Fed Up!: Our Rights, Our Constitution, Our Fight for Freedom from Big Government.
(Language: English)
 
A heartbreaking work of staggering idiocy.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-07-19 05:07:53 for The Partly Cloudy Patriot.
(Language: English)
Sarah Vowell has written both a love letter and a religious tract to describe her patriotic faith in political participation. It's charming, it makes you laugh, and it's impossible to read without wanting to have Sarah as your friend.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-06-23 07:04:35 for Unfamiliar Fishes.
(Language: English)
Never understood my Tutu's veneration of the British monarchy until I read Sarah Vowell's nuanced and entertaining history of Hawaii. Unfamiliar Fishes makes a good companion to the morning newspaper. Manifest destiny was the label they used to paper over the illegal annexation of the Hawaiian monarchy. Now a Hawaiian-born President, who graduated from the same private school that educated the coup leaders, is pulling us out of Afghanistan.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-06-12 09:50:57 for When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man.
(Language: English)
If you're a political consultant, read this book just for the Ferguson question. Thank me later.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-06-03 03:11:52 for Culture of Fear.
(Language: English)
It is impossible to put this book down and conclude that we are a rational society that makes sober decisions about risk and safety.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-05-14 07:38:16 for Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House.
(Language: English)
This is a terrific observation of pre-Rove, pre-Obama politics. Michael Lewis has much to admire, most notably his solution to staid political journalism, the minor courage of stating what everyone knows to be true but refuses to report, and his willingness to be the cause and to report the effects. But anyone who voted for Ralph Nader is a nitwit who mistakes the process for the product and who violently ignores the stakes of any national election.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-04-08 08:33:19 for War.
(Language: English)
It is impossible, at the end of this story, not the see the war in Afghanistan from an American soldier's point of view. I don't mean that you're able to see it from a soldier's eyes, but that it's impossible not to, and that makes holding any coherent, dispassionate political view of this conflict almost impossible for me.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-04-04 04:21:07 for The Appeal.
(Language: English)
Meh. Cowardly, trite ending.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-02-28 01:16:39 for Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows.
(Language: English)
Done. Read them all, every chapter of every book to the little Muckrakers with a little relief pitching here and there from sitters and The Wife. It has taken us years at a chapter a night to finish the Harry Potter series. Some day I'll look back wistfully on the experience of reading these books to my sons, but now I am only filled with the wish that J.K. Rowling wasn't such a crap writer.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-02-25 07:47:55 for July, July.
(Language: English)
O'Brien falls short of the expectations he set with "The Things They Carried," but "July, July" is a decent way to sneer at the Baby Boomers.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-02-20 12:23:53 for Freedom: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club).
(Language: English)
Jesus Christ on a corn dog. This is a spectacular story about how America has wasted its freedom, abused this amazing gift, in ways big (the Iraq War plays a supporting role in the novel) and small (the evil marital abuses leave marks). No one writes about decent midwesterners as well as Jonathan Franzen, who avoids the cynical pitfalls of the '70s standard bearers (Updike, Irving et al) and takes his place next to Richard Ford as the guys who wear the green jackets on this continent.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-01-30 07:33:06 for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight An African Childhood.
(Language: English)
If a friend gives you this book for Christmas, you not only got a stunningly well-written memoir of a odd childhood in Africa, you have learned that your friend has superlative taste in books and respects yours as well.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-01-16 02:51:30 for Just Kids.
(Language: English)
Nothing like this in America. Nothing like this time in a culture, nothing like this woman, both a rocker and a poet, strangely prim and discrete in the epoch of experimental vulgarity, and nothing like this relationship that improved our culture, our view of ourselves and compassion for each other.
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A Reader posted a review at 2011-01-01 10:05:30 for Miami.
(Language: English)
Joan Didion has such an observant wit that her reportage reads like that of a foreigner relating our ways to his countrymen. She writes with a clean, plain face, no make up, and tells a story about a part of America that seems like it could not possibly have existed in your lifetime.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-26 11:15:56 for Star Island.
(Language: English)
Wish I had one client like Clinton Tyree. Always fun to visit Carl Hiaasen's Florida. Always sad to leave it, and this time it was no different.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-22 01:38:56 for The Politician: An Insider's Account of John Edwards's Pursuit of the Presidency and the Scandal That Brought Him Down.
(Language: English)
Anyone who's ever worked at a politician's right hand will recognize some truth in this book. The luckiest of us will recognize very little. Fred Baron, rest in peace.
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![Bad Monkeys [BAD MONKEYS]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31iqA3yvwXL._SL75_.jpg "Click to see other reviews for this book") |
A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-20 07:53:56 for Bad Monkeys [BAD MONKEYS].
(Language: English)
This sucker's not going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it will probably make a hell of a movie. It's Philip Dick meets Salt. Bad girl kicks much ass.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-20 07:51:52 for Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor.
(Language: English)
Staggeringly honest look at the Bush White House from a hardcore conservative speechwriter, and a compelling memoir. I thought I would hate this writer because of his politics, but I came away admiring the clarity with which he evaluated people around him and his courage in describing what he saw. His fly-on-the-wall description of W's inability to grasp the basic elements of the bank bailout during the financial meltdown was horrifying.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-11-01 08:42:11 for Imperial Bedrooms.
(Language: English)
It was interesting to revisit the characters who fascinated me in high school, but sad to see that Clay, Julian and Blair didn't do anything with their lives and seem, if possible, less engaged in the world than they were before. Bret Easton Ellis' command of detail and atmosphere 20 years ago has abandoned him. All I know about these characters now is that they vaguely recognize the details of their own lives and have no idea what they are doing with them. For someone who wrote novels that drove tent spikes into the zeitgeist as a young man, Ellis shares a failing with his semi-autobiographical protagonist Clay: Dude hasn't grown up.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-09-27 09:23:58 for Dear American Airlines: A Novel.
(Language: English)
O'Hare as purgatory, American Airlines as an arbitrary, malicious deity. Sold.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-09-27 09:22:28 for Mysteries of Pittsburg.
(Language: English)
Before "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," before "Wonderboys," Michael Chebon wrote this in his mom's attic, mostly because everyone else in his grad school program was writing a novel. It must have been amazing to write this as his first novel.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-08-30 07:28:50 for The Wordy Shipmates.
(Language: English)
This terrific story about the Christian founders of America and their hostility toward freedom of religion, assembly and speech makes me yearn to buy Sarah Vowel too much wine and listen to her talk.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-06-07 07:02:28 for Girl in Landscape: A Novel.
(Language: English)
This novel has grad-school self-indulgence written all over it. Glad Lethem developed into the writer he is.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-05-20 06:39:55 for An Unfinished Season: A Novel.
(Language: English)
Structured with the inevitability of a last summer vacation, this novel portrays the emotional life of a 19-year-old well. Not sure how many 19-year-old boys are like this, but I'm sure we'd all sound like this if Ward Just would write us.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-05-05 09:56:17 for Up in the Air (Random House Movie Tie-In Books).
(Language: English)
Great book about the creeping insanity and insularity of frequent business travel, but shockingly, the movie was much, much more coherent and well-structured.
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| My Reviews - Page 1 of 4 |