Book Reviews and a Little More…
“Here is a book that is a pleasure to recommend. . . . A collection to be dipped into time and time again.”Los Angeles Times “Raging, satiric, devastatingly caustic and witty.” – Publishers Weekly
Read moreThe four Calhoun sisters and a special sister-by-marriage are all united by a decades-old legend and the determination to save the Towers, their magnificent family mansion on the rocky coast of Maine. Sweet sister Lilah saved a mysterious stranger from drowning. Adrift in a storm, Max thought he had hallucinated the beautiful mermaid who came to his rescue. But Lilah was a woman of flesh and blood . . .
Read moreThe best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that’s that—the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?” In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves’ heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of “ectoplasm” in a Cambridge University archive.
Read morePhD candidate Mitch Samuel’s life isn’t going exactly according to plan: his girlfriend just dumped him (to be fair, he did forget to pick her up at the airport), his estranged father has landed in the hospital, and his literary masterpiece-one part Shakespeare, one part Steinbeck, and all parts lyrical epic-has been rejected for the umpteenth time.
However, after a chance encounter at Starbucks with the queen of women’s fiction- Katharine Longwell-who seems to take a liking to him, he senses an opportunity for literary riches, if not reputation. After telling her that his (imaginary) female cousin is an aspiring chick-lit author, he secures a promise from her that she’ll help his “cousin” get published. The only problem is, Mitch needs a manuscript, and fast.
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