Archive for April, 2007
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Right Book, Right Time: Holidays in Hell, by P.J. O’Rourke
Some books have appeared in my life at exactly the moment I needed or could appreciate them. This is one of those books.
It was the autumn of 2003, and I was spending two weeks in Paris as a prologue to a three-month internship in Prague. (Grad school rocked.) It was the first time I’d [...]
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Thursday, April 19th, 2007
Recommended for You
I have an unhealthy relationship with Amazon.com’s “Recommended for You” feature.
While some of our interactions are positive and result in me finding new books to love, I tend to look at RfY’s suggested products as referendums on my personality and worth as a human being.
For example, at the moment my #1 book recommendation is “The Coming [...]
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Monday, April 16th, 2007
On the Bookshelf: Sweet and Low, by Rich Cohen
The history behind the little pink packets my grandmother used to lift from restaurants is a strange one, and Rich Cohen is a strange narrator for the story. As the disinherited grandson of Sweet ‘n Low inventors Ben and Betty Eisenstadt, “all they have left me is this story.”
The memoir follows Grandpa Ben as he [...]
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Monday, April 9th, 2007
Waiting to Hurl
WE TV, in its infinite wisdom, has put the movie Waiting to Exhale in heavy rotation (along with Scent of a Woman) for April.
I had never actually gotten around to seeing this movie in the theaters or on DVD before this weekend. But I knew that it was a chick movie starring Whitney Houston, so [...]
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Sunday, April 8th, 2007
On the Bookshelf: Company, by Max Barry
I’m plugging away on a book about the Crimean War (what? I’m totally normal!), but I picked this novel up a few weeks ago when I was at that seminar that I said I’d write about but then totally didn’t. With me so far?
So, “Company.” Our hero Jones has just come out of school, and [...]
