The first archaeologist that comes to mind for me is Indiana Jones. The second is Amelia Peabody, the quirky Egyptologist made famous by author Elizabeth Peters. While there are some nuggets of truth about what it means to be an archaeologist in both of those pop culture portrayals, the real lives of the people who [...]
Book Review
Last fall, I indulged my occasional soft spot for quirky young adult stories with Warm Bodies, a contemporary retelling of Romeo and Juliet via the love story between a zombie and a human. (SPOILER ALERT) Inexplicably, the love between human Julie and zombie R manages to reverse whatever virus caused the mass zombification in the first [...]
I love to read books that take me to places I will never get to see, or help illuminate cultures that, without an engaging guide, I will never have a chance to understand. One of my favorite books from 2013 that did just that was Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, a look at lives of [...]
American history is full of grand moments, terrible moments and what were they thinking moments. The Lost Tribe of Coney Island by Claire Prentice is about one of those strange moments in history made even more bizarre by of the actions of carnival huckster who turned out to be a bigamist and a criminal. From the book [...]
I would describe myself as, at best, a casual fan of the Star Wars universe. I’ve seen the original trilogy a couple of times and I fondly remember going to each of the prequel movies with my family when I was a kid, but that’s about as far as my familiarity with the franchise actually [...]
Today I am going to share some thoughts on two books that pushed me out of my reading comfort zone in two entirely different directions. The High Divide, a historical novel about the great American west, let me explore the history of the region that I call home. Broken Monsters, a contemporary murder mystery, played around with [...]
Until I read Margaret Atwood’s newest short story collection, Stone Mattress, I didn’t think that I was a reader who could love short stories. (This, despite being a fan of B.J. Novak’s collection, One More Thing. I am a slow learner) While I adore reading novels built as a collection of interconnected short stories like Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists or [...]
This weekend, a friend asked me for a recommendation for a happy book. As I thought through the nonfiction I’ve read recently, I realized that most of it has been kind of depressing. But that’s one of the reasons I love good nonfiction — authors often tackle stories that are hard to read but need to be told. [...]
I want to get on the bandwagon of people who have loved Roxane Gay’s debut essay collection, Bad Feminist (Aug. 5 from Harper Perennial), so bad that I’ve been tossing and turning my lukewarm reaction to the book around in my head for a couple of weeks, trying to figure out what I might be [...]
I have a shelf on my desk where I keep books that I’ve finished but haven’t reviewed. There are several books that have been sitting there for a month or more that I keep meaning to review… and then can’t find much to say about despite having generally good feelings about them. In the spirit [...]
