Books High and Low

Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart . New York: Fawcett Crest, 1959. 192 pages. ISBN 0449208109. This classic is the most-read book by an Afr...

After reading Maisie Dobbs I discovered that I had two more books from that series on my shelves at home. Although twelve books have been...

Maisie Dobbs is the first book in a series about a WWI nurse who opens her own detective agency. Through alternating chapters we learn ab...

I finally got around to reading this book, although I read so many reviews of it I felt like I'd read it before. As with his other...

Sigmund Freud's 1909 visit to New York and Boston serves as the backdrop to this page-turner of a mystery novel. Doctor Stratham Younger...

Author Guy P. Harrison provides a thoughtful analysis of why it's important to be a skeptical thinker. His thesis is that our memories a...

I really loved Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple. It's about one day in the life of a woman whose life is spinning out of control...

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, is a riveting novel about runaway slaves in the south just before the Civil War. Mr. Whitehe...

As I mentioned in my last blog post , when I read Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance (reviewed here ), I was inspired to pick up Amy Chua's ...

When Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother came out in 2011, I read a number of reviews and articles about it, most of them criticizing author Am...

Between the World and Me is a powerful meditation on race in America. Author Ta-Nehisi Coates shares what it was like for him growing up in...

This short novel revolves around Carl, a middle-aged single man who is taking care of his favorite aunt, Lil Olive. After falling in the bat...

According to the blurb, Overcomplicated "offers a fresh, insightful field guide to living with complex technologies that defy human com...

With Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , J.D. Vance reveals what drives a large swath of our population from the s...

Dan Lyons was a journalist for many years, most recently for Newsweek , before he was fired in 2012. He worked for a while as a writer for a...

Trisha is a nine-year old girl hiking on the Appalachian Trail with her mother and brother Pete. Post-divorce, her mother is always arrangin...

Another Brooklyn begins as middle-aged August returns home for her father's funeral. She spends some time with her brother, but is draw...

I'm always interested in reading about the benefits of embracing a healthier lifestyle, so I was intrigued by Arianna Huffington's n...

Sea Miner: Major E.B. Hunt's Civil War Rocket Torpedo, 1862-1863 is the story of the little-known development of a torpedo during the C...

The subtitle of Crawling Out , "One Woman's Journey to an Empowered Life after Breaking a Cycle of Abuse No One Should Have to Endu...

During a recent trip to Scotland, a place that I've wanted to visit for many years, I realized how little I knew about Scotland's ...

In Louise Penny's 12th mystery, A Great Reckoning , Inspector Gamache has taken on the leadership of Montreal's police academy in an...

In this riveting, suspenseful novel by Noah Hawley, artist Scott Burroughs and a four-year-old boy are the only survivors of a plane crash o...

I've gotten a bit behind in my book reviews, so I'm just going to mention each book briefly. I wish I had more time to discuss them;...

The Last Brother is by far the best novel that I've read so far this year. It tells the story of Raj, a young Mauritian boy, and David,...

This is the story of two families, American and Indian. Somer and Krishnan met while in school, fell in love and married. Krishnan assimi...

Author Vaddey Ratner was five years old when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and forced all of the city dwellers out of the city and in...

This collection of 15 interconnected short stories are about a group of characters centered around 145th Street in Harlem. The central theme...

Everything you need to know about this book is summarized in the title: The Heart-Led Leader: How Living and Leading from the Heart Will Cha...

I first became aware of Walter Dean Myers when I was in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh and attended an event at which Mr. M...