Category: Micro-Reviews

Yet another book about the Mafia? Is there really anything left to say? Only if you like spending time in this corner of the true crime universe. The book follows the rise and fall of a mobbed-up union leader in 1970s Cleveland. “Irishman” Danny Greene …

Presidential memoirs are notoriously guarded exercises in protecting the author’s image. Uncomfortable truths are suppressed. Important backstories are ignored. Anecdotes are anodyne. This book is no different. Despite Obama’s obvious brilliance, charm and eloquence, he’s clearly determined to keep the reader at arm’s length. For …

To mark the milestone of our 50th review, we present the best novel ever written. This earth-shattering work is unrivalled in every way imaginable. Thomas Pynchon wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Any author who reads Owad’s work and doesn’t retreat to the …

This book by a medical examiner in New York fairly reeks of formaldehyde—but in a good way. Melinek guides us through homicides and suicides and John Doe cases without glorying in gore and without losing respect for the dead. She brings us into the autopsy …

A curveball this week: a sixty-year-old play that’s nothing like the plays that get written today. The story follows a defrocked minister who’s having a nervous breakdown triggered by weakness of the flesh. It’s a story about wounded souls at the end of their ropes—about …

The account of a Canadian-Egyptian journalist who was jailed in Egypt for the crime of being a journalist during a time of political upheaval. As Al Jazeera’s Cairo bureau chief, Fahmy commits the unpardonable sin of reporting facts. For his troubles, he is denounced as …

This biography of America’s most famous literary recluse touches on all the main aspects of the writer’s life, from growing up as the son of a buttoned-down pork importer to the instant fame that followed The Catcher in the Rye to his later years as …

A literary zombie tale by a highly respected author. After a zombie plague has wiped out most of humanity, mild-mannered Mark Spitz is charged with helping to clear “straggler” zombies out of Manhattan high-rises in order to start resettling the city. We’re not sure what …

Some books you feel guilty about not liking. This novel about a future civil war in the United States has most of the elements of great fiction: sympathetic characters, attention-grabbing storyline, elaborate world-building and intelligent metaphors. But the overall effect is somehow less than the …

So why would an intelligent twenty-year-old man one day decide to chuck everything, walk into the woods of Maine–and then stay there for twenty-seven years? It’s tempting to see the solipsistic retreat as a manifestation of childhood trauma and/or mental illness, but that’s not the …