Whew! Finally in the double digits for reviews! Last CBR I reviewed the first of the Artemis Fowl books, and I loved it so much I went hunting for the rest of the series. All of our favorite characters are back! Holly, Root, everyone’s favorite pre-teen mastermind, and excitingly, Mulch Diggums, who is my personal squee character. While this installment started out a little rocky, it finds its footing about a quarter of the way though and becomes the romping fun adventure we were all […]
The Cycle of Poverty
Thanks to bonnie’s review for turning me on to this book. This was a brutal, heartbreaking, depressing and necessary read. Desmond is a sociologist who spent several years living in Milwaukee’s depressed and impoverished areas, befriending and interviewing the residents of trailer parks, flop houses, and slums. He tells their stories in intertwining chapters that would read like fiction if you didn’t already know that these people are all incredibly real. Because often fact is stranger than fiction, or in this case, revealing, Desmond’s […]
The Longest Life
My second five-star book of the year! “Forever” follows Cormac O’Conner, an Irishman from the 1730s, who becomes gifted with long life through a series of spectacular and semi-magical events after he immigrates to New York. There’s one catch to his near-immortality, though: he can never leave Manhattan Isle. He becomes penned into the island’s boundaries where he watches the dank little Hudson River town turn into the roiling metropolis of the modern era. He lives through British soldiers fighting Washington’s troops in the forests around […]
It’s a Garden Implement, People
We’ve either completely derailed as a society, or we’ve come so far from an agrarian culture that no one, and I mean no one, seemed to realize that the title of the book I’ve been reading for the past month refers to a garden implement used for breaking up soil…. Every single person who saw me reading this book from professors to family members to my freaking doctor all looked at the cover with incredulity and went “um…the polished…ho?” NO! NO, people! No. This book […]