Guests
by Benjamin H., May 22, 2014 4:10 PM
These stories are just so wonderfully strange! Keret stands with Tom Robbins in the arena of bold and brazen quirkiness. With a blend of humor and pathos, he offers us slices of life seen from oblique angles, so that the mundane... never is
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Guests
by Benjamin H., April 26, 2014 12:30 PM
Our hero, Raleigh Hayes, is a respectable insurance salesman whose fortune cookie just predicted he'll soon go completely to pieces. It might be right. His father just dodged the nurses and escaped in a Cadillac, with a teenage girl in tow. A wild road-trip adventure ensues as our hero, with an increasing carload of wacky, loveable characters, goes crashing through the South in
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Guests
by Benjamin H., March 6, 2014 4:53 PM
One family of hardheaded loggers goes against the entire town, but there's so much packed into the emotional lives of each character that any plot summary falls far short. Let's just call it a masterpiece, a whirling conflagration of desires, expectations, disappointments, and family, all colliding in the Oregon rain. You've got to stay on the bounce — and give Kesey's greatest novel (yeah, I said it) a
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Guests
by Benjamin H., October 19, 2013 10:39 AM
Ever since Tina Fey adapted a nonfiction book into the successful Mean Girls, a desperate Hollywood has been hard at play turning serious works of nonfiction into the next goofy romp. While the collision of military black ops and new-age thought, as offered up by Ronson, does have definite moments of hilarity, it should also strike terror into every reader. At first you can't help but laugh, but as the exploration continues, you begin to recognize that the people in charge have lost their minds and are turning to gurus for insight in how to kill people better. The movie goes in for another laugh before you can really get thinking about
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Guests
by Benjamin H., September 9, 2013 5:06 PM
In the first hundred pages of The Sunflower, Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal recounts his encounter with a dying German soldier who asked to speak with "a Jew" in order to seek forgiveness. Wiesenthal then invites everyone into the discussion, throwing open his personal experience for judgment in a series of short essays offered by philosophers, theologians, scholars, and religious leaders who offer their thoughts on what Wiesenthal should or could have done. More than a memoir, this is a deep exploration of the very idea of forgiveness. I read it over a decade ago, and it's still with
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Guests
by Benjamin H., December 23, 2012 12:00 AM
Fascinating, insightful, and deliciously readable, Future Perfect is at once a deep social analysis and a sharp forecast of how things can, should, and might soon be done. Consider: the news media like big events, and there's always room for complaint, but what if these biases are hiding the fact that things are really getting better, just incrementally? That's where Johnson begins his investigation, but the book is... bigger. After all, this is the writer who wrote Where Good Ideas Come From, and he's packed this book with solutions that are a tier above. Johnson unites the best of libertarian aspirations and progressive values, giving us a window into America's underground political reality with his depiction of the peer progressive, which is probably what you are, whether you've known it or
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