Book Reviews

When CinemaScope arrived in the early 1950s, it was Hollywood’s effort to create more realistic film making by putting a wider image into a smaller area without significantly reducing the content or quality of the image. Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause takes …

Dunning, who has won the Nero Wolfe Award, wrote Booked to Die and The Bookman’s Wake. Both were excellent. This new book pales, however, in comparison to the two earlier ones. Dunning owned a Denver bookstore for many years but now does his sales online. I mention this because in …

Well, I found the perfect book bridging my career change. During the week or two between leaving the journalism profession and starting in the education profession, I was volunteering at a school when I spotted a book with this title: Girl Reporter Sinks School by Linda Ellerbee. I knew the …

Why do we wonder about questions like this? Why do we buy books that claim to answer questions like this? Why do books like this hit the bestseller lists? We could chalk it all up to innate human curiosity. Or perhaps it is some natural fascination with minutiae and trivia. …

'Tis a shame that George is a whiner.

Robert Crais, along with George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, is part of a new generation of crime writers that are sometimes as good as older masters like Robert Parker and Donald Westlake but sometimes miss the mark. The vocabulary and situations in their books are sometimes more modern, …

"A narrative of history that was written to awaken consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality and national arrogance."

As with many reporters, I will always have a soft spot for Michael Connelly. While I was working as a crime reporter for the Hemet News and the Sun City News in So. Cal as a younger man, he was a cop reporter for the L.A. Times. My dream then …

Ayres presents his feelings of terror and pain during nine days "embedded" with the marines during the invasion of Iraq.

When he's funny Block can be as hilarious as Donald Westlake, one of my true writing heroes....