The Wine Lover’s Daughter by Anne Fadiman
★★★☆☆ The essayist, critic, and radio mainstay Clifton Fadiman is an entirely fitting subject for a book, but even more appropriate is to have that book be a brilliant love letter from his daughter....
Author: John Formy-Duval
Ethics: The Art of Character by Gregory R. Beabout
★★★☆☆ If you only vaguely remember Plato’s cave analogy or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, or you are confused as to what passes for ethical behavior in our current fraught times, then Gregory R. Beabout’s succinct...
London’s Triumph by Stephen Alford
★★★★☆ “The Elizabethan and Jacobean mind was brilliantly elastic.” “Thinking a project achievable somehow made it so.” In London’s Triumph, Stephen Alford succinctly captures the expanding worldview of an insular nation that grew from...
Best Books of 2017: John’s Picks
Every list of “Best Books” is purely subjective, hostage to one’s personal tastes and to the seldom-acknowledged detail that the evaluator is never able to read all the books available in a given year....
Sleep no More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James
★★★★☆ Murder in multiple guises invades the six intimate stories of death in P.D. James’ Sleep No More, with emphasis not on the victims but the perpetrators and how they came to commit this ultimate...
Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Leonardo da Vinci may be the best biography of the year. It has certainly received the most hype, and in this instance it rises to the level of approbation...
Hope Valley by John Manuel
★★★★☆ Regional novels published by small presses face great difficulty gaining traction in the massive world of publishing. Tens of thousands of books are published each year, most of them by major publishers who...
The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “Pretty took the will to be so and the money to do it and the time to see to it and the sleep to maintain it, and Ella didn’t...
Unbound by John Shors
★★★★☆ John Shors’ thoughtful novels are all set in the exotic Far East, underpinned by universal themes of a search for love and the bonds that bring people together. Beneath the Marble Sky featured...
