A small but successful town south of Berlin. The 67-year-old wife of the former mayor, herself a pillar of the town, goes missing along with her elderly cocker spaniel. A few days later, both are found in the forest, brutally… Continue Reading
Graphic novels, or in this case graphic biographies, are a new world to me. I’ve always looked at the arts rather like a primary school gym teacher: words over here, pictures over there, no talking in lines! PWEET! But then… Continue Reading
(Editor’s note: This review comes from Ben Terrall, a freelance writer based in San Francisco, California, whose work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Bay View, In These Times, CounterPunch, and Noir City. The youngest child… Continue Reading
Whatever you expect when you pick up Bill Schutt’s Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (Algonquin), humor is probably not part of it. Cannibalism is certainly not laugh-out-loud funny. It is, however, muscularly written and the dark material is tamed somewhat… Continue Reading
From the outset, the premise captivates. Where once women might have been judged by the turn of an ankle or the shape of a cheek, we live in time when what is attractive can have a deeper meaning. And while… Continue Reading
Though on the surface of things, The Killer Whale Who Changed the World (Greystone) is about a single whale who lived (though not for long) in the mid-1960s, Mark Leiren-Young’s fourth book is an astonishingly sharp look at us, the… Continue Reading
Tools of Titans (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). What a name. It suggests that these pages contain not just the habits of mere mortals, but of titans. Titans being, at the very least, the equivalent of Gods. Probably even a divine rung… Continue Reading
There is a phrase I have used many times that is usually met with a shocked expression. It is this: The universal voting franchise was a terrible idea. “You can’t possibly mean that,” is the helpful response from people who… Continue Reading
Reviewed by Hubert O’ Hearn (This is the first of a series of reviews and author interviews examining the current state of US politics.) Let me put it to you this way: We want our governments to decide like Vulcans,… Continue Reading
True-crime aficionados are going to eat up Trials of the Century: A Decade-by-Decade Look at Ten of America’s Most Sensational Crimes by Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. Phillips (Prometheus). But they won’t be the only ones. As the introduction… Continue Reading