Word: books
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hitchcock approaches his self-declared age limit for rock and roll, he beginning to turn his creative energies to another medium: he is writing a novel. The plot? "It's about somebody whose past changes, so by the time the book ends the beginning couldn't have happened," he says. Odd? Certainly. As brilliant as his music? One can only hope...
...start, which kind of takes the fun out of it." This is close to what actually happened, for while her collection of short stories, Flying Leap, received critical acclaim, If I Told You Once lacks the candor, unexpected plots and zany characterizations of her first work. Budnitz's new book emerges as a poorly conceived attempt to weave together mysticism and dramatic human relationships, taking reckless stylistic risks in the process...
...essential weakness in this book is Bourke's limited research and biased bibliography. Her argument feels hollow and lopsided; her sources are undeniably selective and incomplete. Bourke ignores important studies that inconveniently contradict her assertions. Dave Grossman, in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated study, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, argues that most soldiers try to avoid killing and, when forced to kill, experience stages of thrill, remorse and rationalization. Bourke focuses on only one of these stages of emotion, thrill, ignoring the others. Similarly, she completely neglects John Keegan's The Face...
...other hand, Bourke's use of first-hand material is admirable; she deftly explores soldiers' letters and diaries. Perhaps this book would be better read as a collection of war narratives than as a general history of killing...
...ideas are relegated to specific facets of society: messianic religious movements or anti-technology groups. It's the end of the world, the end of Virtue, the end of the Modern Welfare State and now Teri Agins, a veteran fashion journalist at the Wall Street Journal, has written a book called The End of Fashion...