Book Review: Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest...
Is Ben Hewitt’s new book a manifesto disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a manifesto? The title, Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest Guy in the World, suggests a...
View ArticleBook Review: The Curiosity by Stephen P. Kiernan
Publicity copy describes the first novel from Burlington journalist Stephen P. Kiernan as “Michael Crichton meets The Time Traveler’s Wife.” That pitch suggests painfully cynical demographic targeting:...
View ArticleBook Review: Spiritual American Trash: Portraits From the Margins of Art and...
“I take nothing and make more nothing from nothing … it’s just what I have to do.” That statement could be a liberal paraphrase of Genesis 1 or something uttered by a Dadaist. It’s actually the...
View ArticleBook Review: I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place by Howard Norman
Howard Norman’s writing is compelling in its restraint. That may sound like trumped-up literary-critic praise and not an honest reaction: Who really likes restraint? It’s a withholding of something,...
View ArticleBook Review: Little Island by Katharine Britton
For the first half of Little Island, Norwich author Katharine Britton’s unsettling second novel, 64-year-old innkeeper Grace Little is stymied and confused — and we readers are confused right along...
View ArticleBook Review: Three Can Keep a Secret, Archer Mayor
The best reality-based movies are riveting even when we know what’s going to happen — Captain Phillips being a current example. The same is true of Archer Mayor’s latest iteration of his Joe Gunther...
View ArticleBook Review: The Séance Society, Michael Nethercott
In 1956 Connecticut, a millionaire with a spiritualist bent has himself hooked to a machine designed to transmit messages from the Great Beyond. The “Spectricator” puts him in contact with the dead,...
View ArticleBook Review: Headwaters: Poems by Ellen Bryant Voigt
At the outset of this review you notice something a little strange the words are plain and familiar yes ordinary but there are no capitals no commas no poetic curbs or grammatical stop signs to impose...
View ArticleQuick Lit: The Scar Letters by Richard Alther
The Scar Letters is a different kind of coming-out story. Its narrator, 40-year-old Rudy Dallmann, has no problem attending kiss-ins with his activist best friend, Tex, or telling strangers he’s gay....
View ArticleBook Review: Nostalgia: A Novel, Dennis McFarland
Is post-traumatic stress disorder a timeless side effect of war or a 21st-century buzzword? Readers may find themselves asking that question as they delve into Nostalgia, the powerful new novel from...
View ArticleSugarbush Owner, Former Merrill Lynch Exec Win Smith Writes Book
Not until the darkest hours of the 2008 financial crisis did Merrill Lynch’s thundering herd finally stampede off a cliff. On the calamitous September weekend that saw the collapse of Lehman Brothers,...
View ArticleBook Review: If Only You People Could Follow Directions by Jessica Hendry Nelson
Back when memoirs dominated the best-seller lists, it was tempting to believe that any writer with a gritty, harrowing past could generate an instant sensation (and sometimes, as in James Frey’s case,...
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