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Showing posts from June, 2019

Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times by Studs Terkel, a guest book review

Today's book review is from a guest, our first. The guest is Bea Cotton, a fluffy white Bichon Frise, who has her reviews ghost written by owner Edie Cotton. Both Bea and Edie are great characters that speak the same language — so to speak. Bea woofs in a language called Dogese, which apparently Edie understands and transcribes for us here in her review of Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times by Studs Terkel. Thanks for reading and share your reviews with us by emailing carol doane at gmail.com. Happy Reading! While just a dog, I simply do not understand the human psychology of denying something that is right in front of you. It’s like saying, “I’m not hot-tempered,” while boasting about pretty much any one human nationality. So, before you beg to differ, I’ll bark off a list of such “somethings,” in case you human readers don’t understand Dogese: environmental injustice healthcare injustice racial injustice gender injustice housing injustice wage inju

Review: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford illuminates the dissonance between father and son, men who straddle the world of heritage and the land of birth, rejecting each other's experience and ultimately rejecting each other. The father reveals on his deathbed how deep this rejection drove him, destroying his son's simple wish for happiness. The story unfolds without excessive tension, introducing two adolescents from the 40s struggling to exist in a world where they are Asian and everyone else their age is not. It builds to a tumult as the two are separated during the egregious forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, as they discover how difficult it is to live a friendship without communication. Prejudice is the slumbering giant waiting to erupt at every turn, hostile, vicious, thwacking aggression that leaves welts on the body and bruises on the heart that do not heal. The hotel, itself a character, hides secrets, hides worldly

The Dirty Book Club by Lisi Harrison, a book review

This story about friendship is an easy read. The dialogue, not pertaining to sex , is clever. The dialogue about the taboo subject runs the gamut from gross, "lying on a hair-filled bathmat with a vibrator," to more gross (read the book). The main drawback is that characters have an obsession with sex, that's what brought the book club into existence, but healthy male/female relationships don't exist and when the reader thinks there may be hope, the couple(s) disband. The relaxed conversation between club members, when it's out that the husband of one is having an affair with the other, is less than believable, even unhappy people don't like to share their partner. Here's the line-up of characters, leave a comment on which one you'd like to spend an afternoon with talking about . . . . . . Books? Gloria,  in order to have a comfortable, well off lifestyle must look the other way and provide "I'll be home soon" warnings for h

The Justice Game by Randy Singer, a book review

Guns. Should weapons made solely to kill humans be legal? Randy Singer introduces his 2009 novel, The Justice Game, with a snapshot from real life, the 1998 killing by a student of the private Christian school teacher, Karen Farley ,  Karen Farley was from Virginia Beach, VA. In the introduction, the author shares that he was the lawyer who represented Farley's family in a lawsuit against the gun store that sold the 9-millimeter machine pistol that killed her. With the novel, his goal was to lay out fair arguments for both sides of the gun debate and to let the reader decide whose side they're on. The author further explained that he had created and posted an online video about the arguments heard in his novel, and had asked viewers to render a verdict based on that information. He used the crowd sourcing results as the ending to this novel. Skeptical of the gimmick, but interested in checking the book off my list – the novel had languished unread on my Kindle since