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Reader's Link
Browsing all staff pick reviews written by 'curious'
Title: Silk Road: a new history
By: Valerie Hansen
History compiled from back-of-the envelope scribbles? Hansen snares one's attention immediately by noting that much of what we surmise about the Silk Road has been pieced together from writing on recycled scraps of paper. She organizes what might have been confusingly episodic material around six key sites, creating a coherent ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Feb. 11, 2013
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: We Sinners
By: Hanna Pylväinen
This is a first novel with a precise and biting viewpoint. Or, rather, viewpoints; the perspective shifts repeatedly from one member to another of a large Finnish-American family riven by the religion meant to bind them. Pylvainen’s prose is spare, but there’s lava beneath the surface, always threatening. Will her ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Jan. 29, 2013
Tags: fiction
0 Comments
Title: Tubes: a journey to the center of the Internet
By: Andrew Blum
2012 was a good year for offbeat travelogues. (See the review of Andrew Blackwell’s "Visit Sunny Chernobyl" elsewhere in our staff picks.) Tubes is a delightful surprise. Blum begins by tripping over a router cable at home, and ends up, after international gallivanting, with an enlightened perspective on domestic digital ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Jan. 11, 2013
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: Visit Sunny Chernobyl: and other adventures in the world's most polluted places
By: Andrew Blackwell
"Visit Sunny Chernobyl" sounds like an invitation you'd happily refuse. Amazingly, Blackwell manages to make this travelogue of the gruesome darkly entertaining. He neither trivializes horror nor wallows in it. He makes it bearable to consider these sites, and, in so doing, discourages despair. It's a fine fury that drives ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Dec. 26, 2012
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: The Tiger's Wife
By: Téa Obreht
It's an odd moment, when you realize that you might be in the presence of greatness. The shiver that goes down your spine is unmistakable. You don't know whether the writer or composer or choreographer has hit a once-in-a-lifetime bulls-eye, or whether this is just the first of many astonishments. ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Dec. 19, 2012
Tags: fiction
0 Comments
Title: London Under
By: Peter Ackroyd
Peter Ackroyd's "votive offering to the gods who lie beneath London" is also an artifice -- or should that be an edifice? -- of eccentric pedagogy. Like the ever-so-slightly unsettling vicars of period British mysteries whose obsessively detailed leaflets are strewn about churchyards where murder lurks, Ackroyd's no man to ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Feb. 13, 2012
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: Just My Type
By: Simon Garfield
Delectable. For those who relish font variety but cringe at typographic promiscuity, here's a tonic. Garfield has a gift for pedagogy without pedantry; his book conveys a great deal of information without bogging down. The book's design supports his text admirably. The illustrations are crisp, and detailed discussions of a ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Jan. 23, 2012
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: The anthropology of turquoise: reflections on desert, sea, stone, and sky
By: Ellen Meloy
Warning: when you discover that Ellen Meloy died suddenly in 2004, you may feel bereft. "I was just getting to know her; how could she disappear?" The consolation is her books. Call them naturalist's memoirs or personalized landscapes or eco-history or (as she did) anthropology, they add up to a ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on April 28, 2011
Tags: non-fiction, biography, travel
0 Comments
Title: Soul Mountain
By: Xingjian Gao
Whether or not the Nobel Committee was looking for an excuse to honor a Chinese writer, they did this one right. Soul Mountain has the intense clarity of mountain light, so sharp it hurts -- and exhilarates. It is also, unexpectedly perhaps, extremely funny, and at times raunchy. It exercises ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Jan. 6, 2011
Tags: fiction
0 Comments
Title: Temples of Delight
By: Barbara Trapido
Barbara Trapido is quicksilver. Her prose beguiles. Her plots twine. Her characters dart. Sadly, SCPL owns only three of her seven books, five of which are linked, although not linearly. Start with the Mozartean Temples of Delight, then read her first two books, Brother of the More Famous Jack and ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Dec. 16, 2010
Tags: fiction
0 Comments
Title: Summit Fever
By: Andrew Greig
Most mountaineering writers are mountaineers first. Poet and novelist Andrew Greig did it the opposite way: he joined an attempt on the “unclimbable” Mustagh Tower as expedition scribe, and emerged a mountaineer. Summit Fever, his account of that expedition, is an idiosyncratic classic. Greig may have driven his companions crazy ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Nov. 18, 2010
Tags: non-fiction, biography, travel
1 Comment
Title: What it feels like to be a building
By: Forrest Wilson
What does it feel like to be a load-bearing wall? A pitched roof? A door? Forrest Wilson's figures hunch (I am compacted; I am strong), stretch (be careful what you dump on top of that skinny guy), twist (ouch! torque hurts), and cluster (it takes a village to keep a ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on July 8, 2010
Tags: non-fiction
1 Comment
Title: Why things bite back: technology and the revenge of unintended consequences
By: Edward Tenner
If the words “we’re upgrading our phone system” make you go “uh-oh,” you’re ready for this book. Tenner is no technophobe. But his scientific bent leads him to wonder whether the claims made for various time- and labor-saving gizmos are accurate. Do devices free us, or complicate our lives? Do ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on April 15, 2010
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
Title: ...In the highlands since time immemorial
By: Joanna Ostrow
The drawback to reading and loving Joanna Ostrow’s lovely, quirky first novel is the letdown when you discover that this is all you’ll get. No, Ostrow didn’t die young or suffer a public meltdown; following the considerable success of ...In the highlands she talked about working on a second book, ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on March 18, 2010
Tags: fiction
4 Comments
Title: Send a Fax to the Kasbah
By: Dorothy Dunnett
Read this before all of our Johnson Johnson mysteries disappear from our shelves -- and then hunt down the others. Better known for her bestselling historical fiction, Dunnett relaxed between sagas by producing seven witty mysteries that a perceptive reader characterized as "pure Carnaby Street." (Think Britain, Beatles, miniskirts...) Send ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Feb. 22, 2010
Tags: mystery
0 Comments
Title: Into the heart of Borneo
By: Redmond O'Hanlon
Possibly the funniest travel memoir ever written, as well as an unexpected gold mine of accurate scientific information. When O'Hanlon invited his Borneo travel companion, the poet James Fenton, on a succeeding journey, the answer was an earbreaking NO! Would most readers want to accompany O'Hanlon? Probably not. But a ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Jan. 30, 2010
Tags: non-fiction, biography, travel
2 Comments
Title: A unit of water, a unit of time: Joel White's last boat
By: Douglas Whynott
You’re not likely to stumble upon this gem unless you’re given to browsing technical tomes on boat construction. But oh, how lucky you’d be! This engrossing portrait of a cranky, brilliant craftsman racing against terminal illness is also a family saga: master wooden boat builder Joel White was the son ... [Read more]
Posted by curious on Nov. 30, 2009
Tags: non-fiction
0 Comments
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