Review By William McKeen, December 2008
Book by Paul R. Mullins
University Press of Florida, 200 pages, hardcover, $24.95
It is one of the most glorious sights of the New South: the red-and-green neon informing the world of nirvana within. Few things in life are more tantalizing than the beseeching “HOT DONUTS NOW” sign. Read the rest of this entry »
By R.M. Cannon
Book by Andrew Gordon
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 302 pages, $26.95
If you hadn’t known movies have layers upon layers of psychological mud, Empire of Dreams clarifies this fact beyond doubt. An almost 10-year write by a University of Florida professor with mega-doses of research, Dreams discusses 30 Spielberg films, first quoting him as saying “I dream for a living,” then analyzing what Gordon calls The Suburban Trilogy (E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist). Read the rest of this entry »
Review by William McKeen, October 2008
Edited by Robert Hicks
Center Street Books, 258 pages, hardcover, $23.99
A short-story collection is a tough sell, unless you’re Ernest Hemingway. (And if you are Ernest Hemingway, stop reading and call Ripley’s.)
You need some sort of a gimmick to sell a book of stories. Buyers want tearjerkers, self-helpers and tell-allers in the modern publishing world. The subtlety and grace of a good short story gets trampled in this marketplace. Read the rest of this entry »
Reviewed by William McKeen, September 2008
By Dana Jennings
Faber and Faber, 257 pages, hardcover, $24
This magnificent book is one of the best things written about American music in the last two decades. Not since Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music in 1986 has a writer so deftly interwoven music history with the fabric of the daily lives of those who listen to – and live – the songs.
Review By William McKeen, August 2008
Book By Ian Vasquez
St. Martin’s, 256 pages, hardcover, $27.95
The world could use another Travis McGee right now. In the two decades since he’s been gone, we’ve profoundly missed writer John D. Macdonald’s “knight errant” and salvage expert. He wasn’t a detective in any classic sense. He was just a good, decent man people went to when they needed justice.
By Jeremy Scahill
Nation Books, 452 pages, hardcover, $26.95
Reviewed by Guiding Starr, July 2008
Author Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army documents the birth and growth of a recent radical change in the way the United States views its military.
By Tom Cain
The Viking Press, 322 pages, hardcover, $24.95
Reviewed By William McKeen, June 2008
Samuel Carver is a paid assassin who makes his work look easy and his hits look like accidents. For Carver, it’s an honorable vocation – fighting evil one bad guy at a time.
Reviewed By William McKeen, May 2008
You all remember James Michener, the celebrated author of best-selling doorstops. Once he found the magic formula – around the time he published Hawaii in 1959 – he eased into a comfortable pattern: every other year he published a massive book with a one-word title (Iberia, Centennial, Chesapeake, etc.) that somehow tied together geology with the parade of humanity across the planet.
Book By Edna Buchanan, September 2007
Simon and Schuster
320 pages, hardcover, $25
No one likes a rut. When a mystery author creates a compelling character – and then builds a series around that character – it’s easy to fall into a trap. To break out, the author creates another fictional character and builds a series around that character. Somewhere down the line, some wise acre at the publishers’ office suggests that the author have the characters meet. Read the rest of this entry »
