Looking for Your Next Book

Is it possible to wait 50 years for one book?  Yes. Fans of Harlan Ellison and/or his Dangerous Visions collections have been waiting for this particular book for just that long. Is it possible for a book that one has been waiting for for half a century to even come close to meeting fifty years' worth of expectations?  Ahhh, that is the real question, isn't it?  The answer is a resounding "Yes!"  The stories ... well let me get to the stories in a minute. Although this project was underway in the 1970's, the late Harlan Ellison was constantly questioned "When would it come out?" "What's taking so long?" This isn't a surprise.  The first two books garnered a lot of attention, really pushed some boundaries and quite probably changed the face of science fiction and speculative fiction. So, the last volume ... where is it?  The brilliant J. Michael Straczynski - author, editor, and perhaps Harlan Ellison's closest living friend - has pi

DI Vera Stanhope  and her team are called to Rosebank Children's Home to investigate the murder of Josh Woodburn. Josh was a student at university and a volunteer at the home. One of the residents - 14 year old Chloe Spencer - is missing. It doesn't seem possible the two incidents aren't connected, but Vera can't imagine the young teen killing a college boy. Another murder, this time of a boy from Rosebank, is found near three ancient standing stones known to the locals as The Three  Dark Wives. Complicating the investigation for Vera and her team is an influx of tourists for the local witch festival. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of Vera is based the long-running television series which I've been watching on BritBox. And based on this familiarity it threw me for a bit of loop that Vera's 'second' was DS Joe Ashworth.  In the series, Ashworth only lasted four seasons and it's been DS Aiden Healy for the last ten years. But it's almost

Jack the Ripper. The mystery, the legend, the search for his identity never lets up and every few years someone presents their case for uncovering the true identity of the Ripper. The latest in this long line of discoveries is Sarah Bax Horton's One-Armed Jack: Uncovering the Real Jack the Ripper . Horton claims a bit of genealogy to the Ripper case - her great, great-grandfather was one of the police officers tasked with the Whitechapel murders at the time. Using lots of the police notes, as well as coroners' reports and court reports, Horner tells us flat out who she believes committed the atrocities attributed to Jack the Ripper (and a few others).  I won't reveal the name of the suspect, but he is someone that has been among the names bandied about over the last century-plus, and he is not anyone of fame or repute. Like every book purporting to identify the Ripper before this, Horton does a very good job of laying out her facts and reasoning.  But that's kind of the

I first became acquainted with the work of Pilobolus about 1980 when a theatre professor gave me a VHS tape of their performance on a local PBS station. To say that it was life-changing might be overstating it, but within a years time I had created my own 'mime and dance' company which performed locally for three years. I've managed to see them perform live a few times (including in the early 2000's with my 6 year-old, artistic-minded son at West Point where he asked, loud enough for the entire auditorium to hear, "Are they naked?!") and have enjoyed each concert I've been to. Reading about the group is clearly of interest, but there's always danger in seeing the dirty laundry of artists you admire. Author Robert Pranzatelli has taken a deep dive into the history of the innovative dance group - from the humble beginnings, expansion, international acclaim, internal strife, and individual accomplishments. As a fan, I enjoyed this x-ray view of the group.

 I'm really torn on how to rate this book.  There is some really great environmental, grassroots, activism here and author Trish O'Kane details the beginnings of her interest in bird watching and how it leads to the activism, but for me, there's something missing in the connection.  O'Kane starts us in Louisiana as she and her husband ride out Hurricane Katrina and deal with the aftermath - including the birds who return to reestablish their homes. It is watching these birds that starts O'Kane on her birding journey. That journey continues when Trish and her husband move to Madison, Wisconsin where she pursues a PhD in environmental science. Birding brings her to a local, urban park where she discovers not just a great birding diversity but an incredible array of flora and wildlife.  Spending a great deal of time in the park, Trish learns that the diversity isn't limited to the wildlife, but the humans who enjoy the park as well. And when the park becomes the lo

 From the Goodreads description for this book:  Helen is in a hotel room with her lover when a gunman murders her husband, Federico, a high-level civil servant, less than a mile away. Helen soon finds herself entangled in a web of suspicion that involves those closest to her - Federico, his parents, and her friend and lover, Giacomo, an ex-terrorist with a new wife and a reinvented life in Paris. As Helen struggles to understand her husband's death and the extent to which she and the people she knows and loves may have been responsible for it, she is forced to examine her own past and the world in which she lives - and to realise (sic) innocence is a very scarce commodity. This book is billed as a psychological thriller, and there's certainly a great deal of psychological misdirection and anticipation going on here, but as for the thriller portion...? I don't know. The biggest issue with this book is that there are no redeeming characters.  To create a thriller you need to