Category: Book Review

Book Review: Love, Honor, & Negotiate

Love, Honor and Negotiate: Making Your Marriage Work by Betty Carter I read a lot of self help books, but I haven’t read a lot of self help books on how to make one’s marriage work. The authors are Betty Carter, who has been a therapist for decades, and Joan Peters, who made it readable. …

Continue reading

Review: Crazy Like Us

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche by Ethan Watters I read a lot of books about psychology and mental illness, but this book took what I already knew to a new level. It discusses four different illnesses in four different cultures: anorexia in Hong Kong, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, PTSD in Sri Lanka, …

Continue reading

Review: Wishful Drinking

Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher This book is basically the written version of a stand-up comedy/memoir of Carrie Fisher. She talks about being the daughter of famous parents (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher) about having her parents’ marriage broken up by Liz Taylor (If you’re going to have a homewrecker destroy your marriage, why not …

Continue reading

Review: How I Became a Famous Novelist

How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely Good humor straddles that razor’s edge between what we all know and what we dare not speak of. This novel started out balancing on that fine line very well. The protagonist, Pete Tarslaw, decides to write a novel so he can become famous and show up …

Continue reading

Book Review: The Canterbury Tales, a Retelling by Peter Ackroyd

The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd I took a class in Middle English in college, and quickly realized that it was about as comprehensible as Dutch. Unlike Shakespeare, Middle English has to be translated. Too bad, because what I read of The Canterbury Tales seemed interesting. So when I saw this at the …

Continue reading