Category: Micro-Reviews

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 …

A semi-biographical novel based on the life of Valentino Achak Deng, a “lost boy” who escapes the brutal civil war in Sudan by trekking hundreds of miles through the desert—where if starvation or soldiers don’t get him, the heat or the lions probably will. Deng …

In celebration of the Ken Burns documentary on PBS, here’s one of Papa’s most-loved collections of short stories. In these tales, Nick (basically Hemingway) grapples with questions of love and death and the mysteries of nature, goes to war, and comes home damaged. The stories …

A memoir of the writer’s early years in rough Massachusetts neighborhoods. The young Dubus’ father leaves the family for a younger woman, his mother struggles to care for three children, and Andre spends a lot of time on the streets being bullied and beaten. There’s …

This book, published in English by the historians at the state museum in Auschwitz (Oswecim, Poland), would make a perfect gift for your Uncle Dave, the Holocaust denier. This volume brings together the writings of three perpetrators of genocide: the first commandant of Auschwitz, a …

It’s 2008. The U.S. newspapers that haven’t gone broke are clinging to the rim of the toilet bowl. One of them, the struggling Philadelphia Daily News, is more interested in tabloid fluff than in hard-hitting investigations. Despite this, two honest, old-school journalists risk their careers …

This classic novel tells the story of Rubashov, a world-weary communist revolutionary who has been imprisoned by leaders of the very system for which he fought. Apart from being a fascinating account of Soviet show-trial tactics, Rubashov’s story is good for the mind. It highlights …

A great many post-apocalyptic novels have been published in recent decades. Only a few of them show us how humankind will face the curtain—true, honest books without zombies or implausible mini-societies or far-fetched ease of survival. This is one of them—possibly the best ever in …

Jake Brigance, the lawyer from A Time to Kill, is back, and this time he’s representing an estate, not a killer. A Mississippi tycoon has committed suicide and left his millions to his African-American housekeeper. A lot of local whites don’t like this. A platoon …