Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
★★☆☆☆ Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon opens a future London – a surveillance state known as the System in which millions of cameras, microphones and other sensors gather information. Health issues are a thing of the...
Author: Mark Flanagan
The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks
★★★★☆ In January 2015, neurologist Oliver Sacks learned that the ocular cancer he had battled years before had metastasized to his liver. He was given six to eighteen months to live. Upon hearing the...
Best Books of 2017: Mark’s Picks
Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis had, over the course of years, established an unusual friendship with Lou Reed, famous for his belligerence with reporters. In Lou Reed: A Life, DeCurtis painstakingly tells Reed’s...
Lou Reed: A Life by Anthony DeCurtis
★★★★☆ After graduating from Syracuse University in 1964, a young Lou Reed took a songwriting job for a label that mass-produced pop tunes and released them under fictitious band names. As a sort of...
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
★★☆☆☆ “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.” In Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, Neil deGrasse Tyson begins at the beginning – the very beginning, as in 14 billion...
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
★★★★☆ With roughly 30 published books and more than 100 pieces in The New Yorker over the course of a half century, John McPhee is widely regarded a master and a pioneer of the...
On Trails by Robert Moor
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Robert Moor opens his book On Trails by recalling the five months he spent walking the Appalachian Trail (AT) from Georgia to Maine. His timing was unidyllic as that...
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
★★★★☆ With Marvel reinventing Norse gods like Thor and Loki for the screen, it seems appropriate that someone should come along to breathe new life into the stories of these and the other Scandinavian...
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
★★★★★ Bill Hayes left San Francisco desolate after the death of his partner, Steve. He bought a one-way ticket to New York and rented an apartment. He recalls observing five ailanthus trees from his...
