Once, reading a book on wildflowers, I learned that there was a plant called bastard toadflax. In Brian Doyle’s Mink River, a flawed but wonderful book, the author disgorges such arcane information effortlessly and wholesale, and we learn perhaps more than we want to know about the flora
MORE
It's time for summer reading, and I plead guilty to loving Frank Langella's Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them. The book is an enjoyable romp through the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and through an astonishing number of sexual encounters. Langella is candid and gossipy.
MORE
I do feel as though I am lowering the tone of this enterprise by writing once again about crime. Robert Lewis's The Bank of the Black Sheep is set in the gray, damp, cold of a Welsh winter, a variation on the theme of the feckless private detective. It's a dark read that deftly combines
MORE
Someday someone will write a book about what swell people real estate developers are, but not just yet. Anne Zouroudi's second book, The Taint of Midas, is another cautionary tale, this time about greed, set on the fictional Greek island of Arcadia. The island's sun-drenched charms have been
MORE
I grew up listening to opera. Every Saturday afternoon at two, during the season, the Metropolitan Opera of the Air filled our kitchen with music. My mother would raise the volume really high for favorite pieces; at intermission we listened to Milton Cross host the Metropolitan Opera Quiz, with
MORE
You may disagree, but I believe that the many sleuths, amateur and professional in English crime fiction are also largely the creations of English, or British, writers. In contrast, it also seems to me that the most famous sleuths in Italian crime writing have been created by non-Italians.
MORE
A fat man wearing a splendidly tailored wool suit and bright white tennis shoes arrives by ferry on the beautiful, remote Greek island of Thiminos. Tourist season is over; winter wind and rain will soon begin to make life miserable for the natives. In Anne Zouroudi's novel, The Messenger of
MORE
I could not resist when our local library offered free lessons in Mandarin Chinese but, sadly, I was not an apt student. On the other hand, the lessons led me indirectly to the books of Henry Chang and to an immersion in "otherness" that I have not often experienced. The sense of
MORE
Carl Hiassen's face, as he looks out at you from book jackets, has changed little over the years: he has a few wrinkles and the wavy hair now has a touch of gray, but the warm and friendly smile remains unchanged. Yet, he is the angriest of men. Hiassen's great success as a novelist has only
MORE
Fifty-two years ago I was a starry-eyed English major hired at Commonweal to answer the telephone and to pound out—literally—correspondence on an old Smith-Corona.
Who could have imagined that the ties would still bind so many years later.
True, I sometimes feel like the comic relief. Not
MORE
Being something of a wimp, I avoid books about satanic serial killings, suffocation by pythons or other unappealing death scenarios. The mysteries I read are usually set in cities or in cozy English villages, but like most book lovers I am always on the prowl for something new and wonderful.
MORE
