The reviews you are looking for…
What is the nature of our own obsessions? How might helping others be the impetus to possibly finding our own peace? These questions swirled around my head as I read about J. Reuben Appelman’s personal investigations into the Oakland County Child Killer case in his book The Kill Jar. The OCCK case is a series... Continue Reading →
Rise of the Superheroes by David Tosh is a fun autobiographical and historical journey through the Silver Age of comics in the 1960s. Tosh breaks up the era into four distinct time periods as he follows the evolution of the heroes and his own love of the genre. He explains the boon of many of... Continue Reading →
For me, the mark of a good historical novel is how quickly and deeply I care about the author’s depictions of the issues of the past. Therese Anne Fowler’s A Well-Behaved Woman had me immediately engrossed in the world of monied NYC society during the Gilded Age. Based on the life of suffragist, socialite, and... Continue Reading →
...The swells, the punters, the opium, and a few extra gelts... Paul French’s City of Devils combines one part oral history, one part entertainment rag, and one part true crime story to tell the bawdy history of the boom days in Shanghai between the wars. French describes it as “The Wild East,” an international settlement... Continue Reading →
Michelle Jana Chan’s novel Song tells the inspirational saga of a young Chinese boy’s struggle to defy class and racial lines in colonial British Guyana in the late 1800s. After a flood in his village in China takes his father and siblings, Song finds his way to Guangzhou and boards a ship that eventually takes... Continue Reading →
Paul's Picks 