Category: Micro-Reviews

There’s no joy in giving a book a bad review, but sometimes the book is so bad that it would be literary malpractice not to. The third book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy was published back in 1999 to mixed reviews, which is surprising because …

An autobiography by the veteran BBC News foreign correspondent. Simpson takes us on his journey into Kabul after the fall of the Taliban, then waxes eloquent on the topic of Capital J Journalism. The high points are his riffs on the concept of journalistic objectivity …

The first novel by the L.A. barfly who became one of America’s most prolific poets. Few writers are more imitated, and few books are funnier and faster from start to finish. Politically correct readers need not peruse. Bukowski delights in offending the offendable (and goes …

In the sequel to The Shining, little Danny Torrance is all grown up and trying to stay off the bottle. He still has the shining, as does twelve-year-old Abra, who’s being targeted by vampiric immortals who want to suck out her magical essence and stash …

This slim volume has two parts: a memoir on King’s early years and a how-to section for aspiring authors. The former is pure enjoyment—King at his conversational best—while the latter is an entertaining read but thin on advice. There are better how-to books out there, …

Any review of Thompson’s work is morally obliged to linger over the phrase “gonzo journalism,” but this book is so much more than that. Underneath the coke and blotter acid, away from the mad dash around the desert, is a mini-treatise on the “brutish reality …

This is more of a eulogy than a review. I went to see LeCarre give a talk at the University of Warsaw in the early 1990s. He had recently stopped feuding with Salman Rushdie over The Satanic Verses, and he had a reputation as a …

The true story of Mokhtar Alkhanshalia, a young Yemeni-American who works as a doorman in San Francisco but dreams of bigger things. Mokhtar sets off for his ancestral homeland to revive the coffee-making traditions of the past. This may not seem wise when Yemen is …

The sequel to the 1988 novel that became the famous Robert Altman film. Studio exec Griffin Mill is back, and he’s still Gordon Gekko with an introspective streak. For him, greed is not only good; it’s the yardstick by which all good things are measured. …

A young woman loses her home. An Iranian immigrant buys the place for a song. She wants it back. He wants to restore his dignity and provide for his family. These people are hanging on to the last thread of the American dream. It might …