The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg
★★★★★ Dear Rick, I have before me, waiting to be reviewed, your newest masterpiece (and, I do not use that word lightly), The Best Cook in the World. Subtitled “Tales from My Momma’s Table,”...
Author: John Formy-Duval
Napa at Last Light by James Conaway
★★★★☆ The genesis of Napa at Last Light, the final volume of a trilogy, began with Napa: The Story of an America Eden (1990), “a journalistic foray to California in the early 1980s.” What...
Gibraltar by Roy Adkins and Lesley Adkins
★★★☆☆ As long as there have been interactions between neighboring tribes and villages, there have been stories like Gibraltar. British citizens who lived in Gibraltar in the late 18th Century got along reasonably well...
Robicheaux by James Lee Burke
★★★★☆ Welcome back, old friend. Now in his twenty-first novel, part-time detective Dave Robicheaux is a character readers can count on. A walking conundrum, both saint and sinner, he will get into trouble and...
Built by Roma Agrawal
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ The wind blows, the ground shakes, and your home remains standing whether it is stick-built or a skyscraper of steel and concrete. There are specific reasons why this is...
The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Reminders of the first lines of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House underpin the opening of Margery Allingham’s small and wonderful 1929 mystery novel The Crime at Black Dudley: “The view...
The Triumph of Christianity by Bart D. Ehrman
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ In The Triumph of Christianity, Bart D. Ehrman attempts to answer the crucial question of how Christianity succeeded when other comparably small religious sects lost traction or disappeared completely....
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....
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...
