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Detectives and CIA Operatives Must Go

(This opinion first appeared in February 2003) The following words and phrases have no business in a decent book: FBI CIA Washington insider sophisticated weaponry special agent top-secret...

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A Million Little Lies

(This review first appeared in January 2006) Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey.  Random House (2004), 448 pages. A memoir is one person’s memories of his life and can’t be expected...

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Punctuation Matters

This month I read two memoirs that I would be giving glowing reviews to, if only they had employed quotation marks.  Is anyone else fed up with the idea that quotation marks in dialogue are...

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Little House Series

HarperCollins has made a horrendous, unfathomable decision that will surely be studied in future college marketing courses in the same chapter as the “New Coke” blunder of 1985. In a woefully...

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Another Cover Art Disappointment

Who doesn’t love a vintage photograph from the author’s childhood on the cover of her memoir? When the image is just right, these covers are among the best. But if a photo that speaks directly to the...

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Iceland

Did we really need a new book in which the author (according to the most recent issue of Publishers Weekly) “peppers the narrative with neologisms supposedly coined by famous gossip columnists, and...

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Formerly Favorite Authors Suffer Simultaneous Brain Damage

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ What a disheartening year it’s been for those of us who want to believe that an author’s subsequent book will be as good as the one that preceded it. Such a string of much-anticipated...

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Three Cups of Deceit

Rating: ★★★★☆ Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way, by Jon Krakauer. Anchor (2011) 96 pages. Vindication!  I read Three Cups of Tea a couple of years ago, well...

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Throw This Book Away

Rating: ★☆☆☆☆ Time to toss your copy of Zeitoun in your curbside recycling bin; it can land on top of Three Cups of Tea in the corner of the bin reserved for books that don’t even deserve donation to...

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