Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you'd prefer being [...]

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Ryun Patterson of the Bookgasm site/blog (slogan: “reading material to get excited about”) has reviewed ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas as you’ve never seen it reviewed before. Excerpt:
Descriptions of human sacrifice and the power of blood magic are commonplace throughout history, but one — Clement Clarke Moore’s ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS — takes place [...]

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My review of this new thriller is up, over at The Book Book.
(Technically, it’s only newish; it came out in the UK several months ago. However, it’s slated for publication here in the US on October 1, under the title The Ghosts of Belfast.)
Capsule review: an excellent story, told in what is — for another [...]

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My review of this book is now online, over at The Book Book.
Short version:

Non-fiction, written by a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist.
Based on fairly current research. Informative. (Especially on the question of what makes you turn your head at someone, or not — at least if they’re within sniffing range.)
Not as provocative as you might imagine, [...]

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I first read about this on Twitter last week, via Travis Erwin: the second annual Book Blogger Appreciation Week, sponsored by Amy Riley of the My Friend Amy blog. Among other details at the site are these raisons d’etre:
WHAT A week where we come together, celebrate the contribution and hard work of book [...]

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My review at The Book Book is up (as promised, weeks ago).
I think most of you are probably familiar with E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and (with Will Strunk) The Elements of Style, maybe Stuart Little and so on. If you’ve read his book of essays, though — particularly the ones written once he left the [...]

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…badly made.
Which is why, recently presented with these two books for review, I will probably start with the latter:

How S*x Works, by Dr. Sharon Moalem. From the publisher [typos supplied by JES intentionally, to ward off The Wrong Sort of Internet traffic]:
Why are women biologically driven to find Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome?
Can more s*x [...]

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Recognize the handsome guy at left? Neither did I.
Then I read Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories, by Harry Lee Poe (a distant cousin of its subject). Turns out that this painting, by Samuel Stillman Osgood, was rendered in about 1845 — four years before EAP’s death.
Right: he had no mustache [...]

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I’ve got a new review up at The Book Book.
Short version: Nurk is a children’s book (the publisher says age range 9-12). But it’s a children’s book in the same way that the Shrek movies are children’s movies. That is, parents who let their children keep this book to themselves are missing out on much [...]

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My review at The Book Book is up.
Probably not a book for everyone — if you disliked, say, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, you’re probably not a good candidate for reading and enjoying (?!?) The Monster of Florence. Unless, that is, the reason you didn’t like the former was that it was [...]

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