Reviews Sending Me To The Bookstore

Good reviews excite me, bad reviews make me wonder, and sometimes make me buy (Curiosity? Pity?) Hello, my name is Randy and I am a review junkie.

Rick Bass’s new book is described in Kate Tuttle’s review at the Boston Globe as “a lovely and valuable book. For the most part, Bass avoids the dangers of non-Africans writing about Africa (though a good editor might have stopped him using variations on the word “inscrutable” four times in under 100 pages). His admiration of the Rwandans — for facing their national tragedy with such honesty and grace, for somehow moving on in optimism and love — is impossible not to share.”

Maria Arana’s review at The Washington Post’s is a beautiful essay about the memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth” by Sophia Al-Maria beginning with: “Sleep under a ceiling, says an old Bedouin proverb, and your dreams will be only as high as the roof beam above you. Sleep under a sky, and your dreams will be as high as the stars. Half-Bedouin, half-American, born in a rustic valley of Washington state, Sophia Al-Maria was congenitally unable to look up as a child. It made her dizzy to glance at a tall building. Open skies made her feel like she was falling upward. Her dreams did not rise so much as plummet: She had a fear of being swallowed by stars.”

I dare you to read it and not want to grab this book off the nearest shelf. 

Caitlin Kelly writes in the following New York Times review “It’s  rare to come across a realistic and readable book about personal finance. Most are laden with rosy promises, followed by acronyms and turgid advice. Helaine Olen, a freelance journalist, offers an exception with “Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry” (Portfolio, $27.95). It’s a take-no-prisoners examination of the ways she says we have been scared, misled or bamboozled by those purporting to help us achieve financial security. . . . “When it comes to money, the vast majority of us are nuts. Bonkers.” She counts some of the ways: “We don’t open our 401(k) statements. We ‘forget’ to pay our bills or file our taxes until the last minute.” Financial literacy is alarmingly low. Many of us don’t budget at all.

Don’t tell my husband, but I know what book he’s getting for Valentine’s Day. Not that he’s one of the bonkers, but if I buy it for myself he’s bound to get suspicious about my already suspect habits.

Anyone out there not need to read this book?

Once you’ve mastered the art of finance, you can move on to applying logic and better decision-making in the rest of your life. Chuck Leddy’s Boston Globe review of Mastermind by Maria Konnikova (a review titled ‘Discovering the Sherlock Holmes in all of us) describes it as “Steven Pinker meets Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in this entertaining, insightful look at how the fictional London crime-solver used sophisticated mental strategies to solve complex problems of logic and deduction. Psychologist and author Maria Konnikova (who cites Pinker as a mentor) goes on to explain how we, too, can learn to develop Holmes’s habits of mind and how that training can help us make better decisions in our own lives.

Michael Dirda’s review in the Washington Post of Selected Letters of William Styron Edited by Rose Styron with R. Blakeslee Gilpin sent me leaping for my credit card–if the book is anywhere near as terrific as Dirda’s review, I’ll soon be very lost in this book.

“Personalia, literary gossip and stylish prose are what make reading collections of letters fun, and Styron’s contain all these. What writer today would dare say, as the youthful Styron does, that  Eudora Welty’s  short stories are “fairly pale. She doesn’t want to commit herself to anything, emotionally or intellectually, either, and thereby commits the crime” — and here young Bill is about to get himself into trouble — “of women writers in general — seeing life through pastel-tinted spectacles, lovely in its way but not in clear white focus.” . . .  When his second novel, “Set This House on Fire,” is blasted by the critics, he confesses: “I did get one good review, however, in Amarillo, Texas, and I cherish it like an amulet, and someday, if you ask, I may show it to you.”

Those who know me well, know all things Madoff fascinate me. Since I’m also entranced by all things bookish, what could be better than Carolyn Kellog’s piece in the LA Times: The Bernard Madoff book collection: Rick Moody, Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The books provide a window into the intellectual life of Madoff and his family. There are big bestsellers by Leon Uris, Caleb Carr, David Baldacci and Sidney Sheldon, dictionaries and other reference books, and histories and biographies by David Halberstam, Walter Isaacson, David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Classics by Cervantes, Willa Cather and Mark Twain.”

Here’s the review a writer dreams of getting:  Me Before You by Jojo Moyes was reviewed by Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times, with this opening:

 “When I finished this novel, I didn’t want to review it; I wanted to reread it. Which might seem perverse if you know that for most of the last hundred pages I was dissolved in tears. Jojo Moyes, the writer who produced this emotional typhoon, knows very well that “Me Before You” — a novel that has already floated high on Britain’s best-seller lists — is, as British critical consensus affirms, “a real weepy.” And yet, unlike other novels that have achieved their mood-melting powers through calculated infusions of treacle — Erich Segal’s “Love Story” comes immediately to mind — Moyes’s story provokes tears that are redemptive, the opposite of gratuitous. Some situations, she forces the reader to recognize, really are worth crying over.”

Sadly, it can’t all be perfume and caviar. Here’s an award finalist group where no writer wants to be listed. Pour a whiskey and read the short list for the other type of reviews, the ones that sent writers straight for the Ativan : “The Hatchet Job of the Year Award is for the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months.”