Cookbooks: Vegan 100 by Gaz Oakley

June 9, 2018 Linda L. Richards 0

There have been a lot of vegan and vegan-adjacent cookbooks published over the last decade as many of us move towards a plant-based diet. Obviously some of these books have been better than others. Some are encyclopedic in nature. Others, for better or for worse, take a single vegan slice. Of the books that try to be all things to all people, I haven’t seen one of the newest generation of vegan cookbooks do it […]

Fiction: The Rule of Stephens by Timothy Taylor

June 6, 2018 Linda L. Richards 0

Catherine Bach is a survivor, something that, after the accident, everyone she meets thinks to make a remark about. How lucky she is. How blessed. She was aboard an Airbus A380-800 that fell from the sky, and she walked away. How can her life be anything but charmed? But Catherine knows that she did not walk away from the accident unscathed, even if the scars she has taken from the crash can’t be seen. Since […]

Art & Culture: Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation by Terri Favro

May 30, 2018 Linda L. Richards 0

This is the year we started paying attention to the shenanigans our tech was getting up to. With dire warnings about the future of AI from the likes of Tesla founder Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking, not to mention the fact that we suddenly noticed that something as seemingly innocent as an online personality test might have repercussions on the entire free world, it just seems suddenly sensible to raise our heads, look […]

Children’s Book Sparks Racial Controversy

May 15, 2018 Linda L. Richards 0

When books are banned or protested, it gives us an opportunity to look more closely at the book being called out and, in certain cases, to zoom in for closer examination which is often followed by more sales. This is one of those times. The book in question is Justice Makes a Difference by Dr. Artika Tyner and Jacklyn Milton and illustrated by Jeremy Norton and Janos Orban. From PR material from the book: Through […]

Sue Grafton Dead at 77

December 29, 2017 Linda L. Richards 0

As far as Sue Grafton’s family is concerned, “the alphabet now ends at Y.” In a message on the author’s Facebook page, Grafton’s daughter, Jamie, posted to let the author’s fans know Grafton has passed away “after a two year battle with cancer.” See was 77. Grafton’s most recent book, Y is for Yesterday, was published last August, a book that the New York Times’ Marilyn Stasio compared favorably with earlier entries in Grafton’s well-loved […]

Non-Fiction: The Handover  by Elaine Dewar

December 17, 2017 Linda L. Richards 1

In 2000, Canadian businessman Avie Bennett engineered a deal to wrest “The Canadian Publisher” McClelland and Stewart, out of the protection of Canadian Heritage and into the arms of a foreign national company in the form of then Random House. Though many Canadians would have thought that would create an outcry, it did not. But journalist Elaine Dewar was paying attention. More: she was there. In her well-reviewed but largely ignored 2017 book, The Handover: […]

Cookbooks: Field Roast  by Tommy McDonald

December 16, 2017 Linda L. Richards 0

I first heard about Field Roast about five years ago when a single Vancouver restaurant was bringing it in for their vegan clientele. At the time, the product wasn’t legal in Canada’s the restaurant would basically mule it over the border, taking great risks that resulted in long lines. A growing vegan market couldn’t wait to get their hands (or mouths) on the stuff. Unlike a lot of vegan meat substitutes now on the market, […]

No Image

David Fincher on Gone Girl

August 26, 2015 Linda L. Richards 1

The adaptation of Dark Places, the second novel from Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) opened this month. Film School Rejects calls the new film “an absolute mess. The issues rest mostly with the script (and presumably the source material), and it’s guaranteed to receive nothing like the reaction afforded the previous film made from her work, Gone Girl.” As Film School Rejects points out, one of the big differences between films is the director. As he […]