Being a Beast Adventures Across the Species Divide Author: Charles Foster Alluring.  Ethereal.  Other worldly.  Mythic, mandatory, factual, philosophical.  Oh, and Charles Foster should be married to a dictionary!! Such great writing! And such solid inquiry into cross species “beingness” (sentience).  Being a Beast is one of those special once in a great moon books […]

Here I Am Author: Jonathan Safran Foer John Updike.  Philip Roth.  Peter Taylor.  Alice Munro.  Jonathan Safran Foer Writers who gift us with families who thrum within their own family universe, then bounce back to us like an echo. I adore Jonathan Foer.  Eating Animals enchanted and mesmerized me. Timeframe:  One month.  Location:  Washington D.C., […]

Prodigals Stories by Greg Jackson With declaratory language succinct as to appear insouciant, Greg Jackson thrusts us into his inner worlds in Prodigals. The first short story, Wagner in the Desert, seems to be semi-autobiographical and tells the tale of a mélange of friends partying as hard as they can and discovering mystical things out […]

Aliens The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Edited and with an Introduction by Jim Al-Khalili I believe that we all have some instinct or thoughts on extraterrestrial life, especially with media movies such as E.T. and other alien movies that capture our imagination.  Roswell has long been a byword in extraterrestrial […]

  Unbroken Brain (A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction) Author: Naia Szalavitz Almost everyone I know has a family member – or is themselves – suffering from addiction of one kind or another.  When I started reading Unbroken Brain, I felt instant relief, for instead of therapy or compulsion, Szalavitz defines addiction as a […]

The Last Place you Look Author: Kristen Lepionka   Private investigator Roxane Weary is grieving – her policeman father has died in the line of duty.  And she is drinking a lot and working less.  So when her brother asks her to help a friend, Danielle Stockton, she takes the case.  Danielle’s brother Brad is […]

Algorithms to Live By The Computer Science of Human Decisions Authors: Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths This book fascinated me, as at the time I was writing about online dating and not seeing anything I liked about the process.  He book begins with an example: what if you are looking for an apartment in San […]

The Last Thousand – One School’s Promise in a National at War  Author: Jeffrey E. Stern We open the paper.  War in Iraq.  War in Iran.  War in Afghanistan.  War, war, war.  The word means nothing to us; this is not our country we have enough of our own problems, etc. etc. Enter Jeffrey Stern, […]

South Pole Station Author: Ashley Shelby Salubrious, acerbic, hilariously funny, deleterious – such a conundrum of affect in one book about life, love and climate change at the furthest place on Earth – South Pole Station – this novel ran with the ethereal wolves and had my laughing, fascinated and bummed out simultaneously.  Entertaining and […]

My Life with Bob Author: Pamela Paul Pamela Paul is my a.k.a., my twin soul, my non-imaginary imaginary friend.  For I too kept a BOB with all thin books I had ever read in it, a long list of my life.  Pamela’s jewel is her intimate manner of allowing us into her Room with a […]