Thinking, Fast And Slow, by Daniel Kahnman
Daniel Kahneman introduces his sweeping and insightful book with an odd little objective; he hopes that those who read Thinking, Fast and Slow will become better at gossip. As he explains, most people are better at judging their friends than at judging themselves, a situation unlikely to change any time soon. But since most people are also pretty well aware of their friends’ judgments, more intelligent gossip might be just as good as honest self-evaluation. The only catch is that for this book to actually… Read the rest
Tender Graces, by Kathryne Magendie
“All my tired flies out the window when I see Grandma Faith standing in the mountain mists that drift in and out of the trees.” So begins Tender Graces, the first book of Katherine Magendie’s Graces Saga, a story that grabs the reader right from the first sentence and doesn’t let go until it’s had all its say.
Tender Graces is a novel about memory, about the ghosts of a broken family demanding witness from the narrator, the adult survivor, Virginia Kate. And Virginia Kate… Read the rest
The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Gary Chapman
The premise of Five Love Languages is that people differ in how they experience love, and only feel love that is expressed in the particular “language” that they understand. Apparently, a major reason that marriages fail is that couples do not express love in the same ways, and so gradually cease to feel loved by each other. Chapman offers hope to couples everywhere with his categorization of five distinct “love languages.” By finding out what each others’ love language actually is, people can make a… Read the rest
Kindle Touch Review
The Kindle Touch is the middle child of the Amazon ereader family. Its siblings include readers with keyboards and those without, versions that flip between landscape and portrait view and those that don’t, plus the Kindle Fire, which is arguably not an ereader at all but a tablet that secondarily reads books.
The Kindle Touch, as the name implies, has a touch screen rather than a keyboard. There are only two buttons, one to wake up or shut down the device, and the other to… Read the rest
In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak died this May. Writers do die eventually, and he was eighty-three years old, but as one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time, he will be missed. Most of the memorial notices we encountered cited him as the author of Where the Wild Things Are, and we agree that is an excellent book, full of whimsy and at the same time not quite safe. Some of the best children’s books contain this element of danger or challenge, because they speak to… Read the rest
Book Boon
Book Boon is a relatively new, and apparently very successful, textbook company. The deal is you can go to their website and download textbooks, travel books, and books on business for free, without registering. You do have to provide an email address. Hundreds of ebooks on a wide variety of subjects are available; the company provides textbooks, business resources, and travel books, all as PDFs, in five different languages, for free. Sounds very much like a boon, right?
Or, maybe not right.
Book Boon publishes… Read the rest
The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss
With the Lorax movie still in theaters and fresh from both its strong box office showing and really bad reviews, let us take the time to again consider the book for its own sake.
The Lorax is an iconic children’s book. Along with such notables as The Butter Battle Book, it is one of Dr. Seuss’ excellent efforts at social commentary, while also being charming enough to stand on its own without its message. In brief, it is the tale of the Once-ler, a shadowy… Read the rest
New eBook Reader from Onyx Boox: i62M
The new eBook reader launched by Onyx is bound to stun with its impressive features. The device is making its way into the United States rather slowly, but people from across Europe and Asia can lay their hands on this beauty quite easily.
The new Onyx reader is similar to the Nook Touch in the physical appearance and one can also associate these ebook readers as the same type of infrared touch screen is embedded in them. Yet the Onyx has profound superiority to the… Read the rest
