Category: Review
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Book Review: ‘Alexander Hamilton’
When the musical Hamilton opens in Chicago on Sept. 27, Midwestern audiences will be able to experience one of the most unlikely projects in the history of musical theater. The guiding genius of this project is Lin-Manuel Miranda, an actor, composer, writer, and hip-hop musician (an impressive, if unusual list of accomplishments). Miranda also has […]
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Book Review: ‘The Audacity of Goats’
After her debut 2014 novel North of the Tension Line, J.F. Riordan returns to Washington Island with her sequel, The Audacity of Goats. In the second novel former Chicago newspaper reporter Fiona Campbell continues to work as a freelance writer living in the old house she had purchased on the island, making occasional trips by […]
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Book Review: ‘The Time of Our Lives: Collected Writings’
By today’s standards, Peggy Noonan was a neglected child. Born in Brooklyn into a large and tempestuous family, she was packed off every summer to stay on Long Island with her two great aunts, immigrants from Ireland. They lived on a barren plain in a small house that was without air conditioning, telephone service, or […]
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While international novels may lose something in the translation, they inevitably gain a great deal in the view they offer into an unfamiliar way of life. Such is the case with Norwegian mystery writer Jo Nesbo’s latest novel, Midnight Sun. Jon Hansen is a reluctant “fixer” on the run from Oslo where he failed to […]
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While international novels may lose something in the translation, they inevitably gain a great deal in the view they offer into an unfamiliar way of life. Such is the case with Norwegian mystery writer Jo Nesbo’s latest novel, Midnight Sun. Jon Hansen is a reluctant “fixer” on the run from Oslo where he failed to […]
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Book Review: ‘A Spool of Blue Thread’
Fans of Anne Tyler’s novels who have come to expect from her a familial saga peopled with quirky characters will not be disappointed by her latest book, A Spool of Blue Thread. Her twentieth novel is set in Baltimore and spans four generations. Central characters Red and Abby Whitshank have reached that age when their […]
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Book Review: ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’
Many readers who discover an author they enjoy, read everything that novelist writes. Such has been the case for me with Elizabeth Strout who achieved fame through her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, an engaging novel that has since been made into a mini-series. When My Name Is Lucy Barton was published this year, I eagerly […]
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Book Review: ‘Ship Captain’s Daughter: Growing Up on the Great Lakes’
The jacket of Ann Lewis’ memoir Ship Captain’s Daughter features a photograph of a little girl standing on a dock waving at a Great Lakes cargo ship, an appropriate image to capture the life of a daughter whose father, Willis Michler, each year spent the season from early spring through late fall sailing on a […]
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Daniel Defoe’s story of Robinson Crusoe (1719) has endured for nearly 300 years in large part because the fictional adventure appeals to the primal fantasy shared by men in particular: a solitary survival far from the sustaining comfort of civilization through wits and endurance. “Could I put to use those skills I supposedly learned as […]
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Bryan Stevenson’s book Just Mercy is both a memoir detailing the author’s experience as a lawyer and an indictment of the failings of the justice system in this country. As a college student the author had studied philosophy, but during his senior year realized that “no one would pay me to philosophize when I graduated.” […]
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The Columbine High School shooting in April of 1999 changed the lives of future students and their parents forever. Now, as President Obama recently stated after yet another school shooting, such tragic events are becoming commonplace. Although schools and police departments across the country have developed protocols for dealing with school shootings, our nation cannot […]
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Book Review: ‘The Marriage of Opposites’
The title of Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, The Marriage of Opposites, refers not only to the union of the central characters in the story, but to other marriages as well that occur in her tale. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and when issues of […]
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Book Review: ‘The Wright Brothers’
David McCullough is one of the nation’s most honored historians, but he may have outdone himself with his recent bestseller, The Wright Brothers. The excellence of this book is partly due to the wealth of available source material. The members of the Wright family were prolific letter-writers and their correspondence is housed in the Library […]
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Book Review: ‘A Winsome Murder’
As a literature teacher I used to tell my students that Shakespeare’s comedies were distinguished from his tragedies, in that at the resolution of a comedy everyone who was single got married; at the conclusion of a tragedy, the body count mounted. In James DeVita’s murder mystery A Winsome Murder, deaths are of course mandatory. […]
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Book Review: ‘North of the Tension Line’
Nearly everyone who has taken the ferry to Washington Island has wondered what life might be like there, a fantasy filled with ambivalence because of the remoteness of that spread of land surrounded by water. While the location in some respects evokes a cozy romantic folksiness, a sense of protection far from the madding crowd, […]
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by Tom McKay, trade paperback, 166 pages, East Hall Press, Augustana College, 2014. Tom McKay’s novel West Fork reads at times like a nostalgic Jerry Apps memoir.
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by Barbara Larsen, 98 pages, Beach Road Press, 2015. Past Door County Poet Laureate Barbara Larsen has been an integral part of the peninsula’s poetry community since 1986 when she and her late husband, George, became full-time residents in the house they had built on a Beach Road bluff overlooking the waters of Green Bay.
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In February of 1957, literary agent Annie Laurie Williams found herself reading a manuscript submitted by an unknown, unpublished young woman who had dropped out of law school and moved to New York, hoping to become a writer.
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In his new novel The Jesus Cow, Wisconsin author Michael Perry does what he does best, recreating for his readers the small town-rural life that seems unique to our state, presenting grassroots characters that can be heartwarming in a salt-of-the-earth way, but at the same time amusing because of their idiosyncratic nature.
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In his new novel The Jesus Cow, Wisconsin author Michael Perry does what he does best, recreating for his readers the small town-rural life that seems unique to our state, presenting grassroots characters that can be heartwarming in a salt-of-the-earth way, but at the same time amusing because of their idiosyncratic nature.