It’s been a long time since I read Walter Mosley’s great Easy Rawlins mysteries, set in post-war Los Angeles. Many years ago a friend gave me RL’s Dream, Mosley’s first foray outside the detective genre. I tucked the book on the shelf to read later. Almost twenty years later I found the book on the shelf last week. Curious to see what I’d missed, I plunged into the book that was described as being about the blues. RL’s Dream is set in 1990s New […]
Mattie Get Your Gun
I am always a little reluctant to read a book after I’ve seen a film adaptation of the same. It’s difficult to imagine the characters on the page, when they’ve already been in front of you, bigger than life on the screen. Fortunately it’s been a few years since I saw the Coen brother’s version of True Grit, although Rooster did look like Jeff Bridges in my mind’s eye. I do recall the film had great dialogue, which couldn’t have been too difficult to write […]
The Second Highest Peak is Harder
If you liked Into Thin Air or have an interest in high altitude climbing this is a good book for you. Ed Viesturs is an accomplished climber; he was on Everest in 1996 during the tragedies described in Into Thin Air. He has climbed all fourteen 8000 meter peaks and unlike many others is still alive. With all of his experience, he brings credibility to his review of 8 different expeditions to summit K2 , including his own. The most interesting of these expeditions are […]
I’ll Take Two (or More)
Although the Mormon church officially gave up polygamy in 1890, the practice is still associated with it, sometimes through contemporary fundamentalist groups or historically. David Ebershoff takes on both a historic and a contemporary story in The 19th Wife. The first story is a fictionalization of the life of Ann Eliza Young, one of Brigham Young’s wives, who divorced him, and later wrote a book called Wife Number 19, became a public speaker and advocate against polygamy. The second story belongs to Jordan Scott, excommunicated […]