Tagged: bookreviews

Glenn Hughes HATES cocaine, but he LOOOOOVES the smell of it. Poor guy is playing bass and singing his ass off in a band called Trapeze during the early 1970's when he gets recruited to join Deep fuckin Purple in 1973 and help revitalize the band with vocalist David Coverdale . They create a monster album called Burn and go on to have major success space truckin around the globe. They play an insane show at the California Jam festival that literally set the stage on fire. But behind the scenes, young Glenn develops a taste [...]

No regrets? A better title for Ace Frehley's memoir might be No Consequences. Parts of Frehley's life play out like an episode of COPS, except that the fuzz show up at a multimillion dollar mansion rather than a tenement. Cars are wrecked. Bottles of booze are chugged. Drugs are snorted. World class tools like Gene [...]

U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens has been pretty busy lately. After showing up in two books by Elmore Leonard, the character was given his own TV show on FX, the critical darling Justified. So what better time than to trot him back out onto the printed page. In Raylan, Leonard's 200th or so book (I'm guessing [...]

Stewart O'Nan has become a favorite author in the Muruch household. I (Vic) first fell for his writing in 1994 when his stark and mesmerizing debut novel, Snow Angels, was released, and Brendan loves O'Nan's 2007 novel Last Night at the Lobster enough to re-read it every winter. We both recently read (and loved) O'Nan's [...]

Comedian Chris Gethard has led a pretty screwed life with an especially bizarre childhood. Thank God he had the presence of mind, and enough lack of pride, to remember it all and to put it on paper. A Bad Idea I'm About to Do is a collection of Gethard's essays, mostly detailing his seemingly, (but [...]

Every cook knows olive oil is essential. For Tom Mueller, it's the lifeblood of Western Civilization. In Extra Virginity , his lively, earnest, exhaustive, and sometime exhausting debut, Mueller discovers oil not only as food, but as fuel, lubricant, medicine, skin care, perfume, aphrodisiac, religious symbol, and way of life. In the words of one aficionado, true extra virgin olive oil is the stuff that "makes you get down on your knees and say, 'Fuck'." As Extra Virginity explains, all olive oils are not equal. Each country has its own varieties, such as biancolilla [...]

Human Kinetics provides the most cutting-edge body and workout titles, no matter what activity, age, sport, or other unique quality one may possess. Tim Bishop has created Stronger Legs and Lower Body, a title that looks to rectify a key problem in one's workout. It is tremendously common to slack on legs days, or to [...]

There mythos of Dune has been carefully fostered over the 45-plus years since the creation of the original title. The latest effort, Sisterhood of Dune, is able to continue adding to this mythos, all while providing an interesting and compelling plot. What I found the strongest about Sisterhood of Dune is how it is able [...]

The latest Ingo Schulze novel is an odd hybrid of sex comedy, road trip, and existential thriller. In Adam and Evelyn , the original sin occurs when an East German tailor named Adam sleeps with a female client. His girlfriend Evelyn catches him with his pants down, then flees to Hungary with a friend and her cousin. On impulse, Adam stalks her across Europe and tries to woo her back to paradise. Set in the pivotal year of 1989, the domestic crisis of Adam and Evelyn unfolds against a political crisis prior to the fall [...]

Take a look at the Music section of your local bookstore. Shelf after shelf of books feeding off the familiar narrative of rise, fall and - ideally - rise again. Time and time again, early promise and hits give way to drugs, booze and other expression-sapping destructive distractions, with a latter-day "comeback" - where applicable - adding a spot of positivity towards the end. Gil Scott-Heron 's career fits this mould perfectly. Success as a poet and a novelist, and a string of strong, socially conscious jazz-influenced soul/funk albums in the 702s [...]

Ben Mezrich has chronicled the high-stakes shenanigans of shady students at elite educational institutions for nearly a decade. His best-sellers include: Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions; Ugly Americans: The True Story of the Ivy League Cowboys Who Raided the Asian Markets for Millions; and The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal . In his latest book, the precocious protagonist is Thad Roberts, an aspiring astronaut who steals moon rocks from NASA. Allegedly worth millions, the lunar samples [...]

A couple of things are made perfectly clear in Ace Frehley's memoir No Regret and neither have exactly been a secret up to this point. First, fellow Kiss member Gene Simmons is a complete asshole who cares about money and little else. No shock there to anyone who has ever heard him utter a word [...]

Roberto Bolaño's best known for his epic novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 , which were translated from Spanish into English to wide acclaim after his death in 2003. In the final years of his life, in poor health and laboring to finish 2666, the indefatigable Bolaño wrote a series of columns for newspapers in Spain and Latin America. Between Parentheses includes more than 100 of these columns, plus several speeches, and a posthumously published interview in the Mexican edition of Playboy . While his fiction is filled with darkness and despair, [...]

In 2009, Marvel Comics was aquired by Disney. DC Comics has been owned by Time-Warner since 1967. In other words, Superman is a corporate trademark. As is Batman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, Wolverine and practically any other superhero the average person can bring to mind. It is fitting, perhaps. Comic Books are a uniquely American invention, along with jazz, rock n roll and, you guessed it, the corporation. Of course our Gods would be owned by them. And make no mistake, the superheroes are American Gods. No matter what Rick Perry and the red states say, we have been [...]

STILL NEEDS EDITS/ADDS FROM NOTEBOOK Roberto Bolaño's best known for his epic novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 , which were translated from Spanish into English to wide acclaim after his death in 2003. In the final years of his life, in poor health and laboring to finish 2666, the indefatigable Bolaño wrote a series of columns for newspapers in Spain and Latin America. Between Parentheses includes more than 100 of these columns, plus several speeches, and a posthumously published interview in the Mexican edition of Playboy . [...]

Roberto Bolaño To read Roberto Bolaño is to enter a world of poetry and violence, where fantasy meets the mundane and the act of writing is a matter of life and death. Since he died in 2003, sixteen of his books, notably the epic novels The Savage Detectives and 2666 , have been translated into English. The latest, The Third Reich, was written in 1989, before these masterpieces, but published only now with the high demand for his work. It is not Bolaño [...]

[Our resident poet Jeffery Berg shares his favorite poetry collections of 2011] 10. Lauren Berry, The Lifting Dress A very strong debut. Berry's Southern Gothic poems are unsettling, beautiful, and mysterious. 9. Nikky Finney , Head Off & Split I'm in awe by the electricity and inventiveness of this collection which pays tribute to the American forgotten and also the emblematic in such poems as "Red Velvet," a moving elegy for Rosa Parks and the [...]

In the latest Ali Smith novel, a precocious 10-year-old girl asks: "If a story isn't a fact, but it is a made up version of what happened...what is the point of it?" Her conversational companion, an eccentric middle-aged man, replies: "Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, just sitting there unopened. Then think what happens when you open it." In that spirit, each of 10 books below is a passageway to possibility, a free trip to another world: whether it's India, Japan, or the Balkans, a college campus in New England, or a government office in Illinois. As [...]

AC/DC is still an amazing act. However, I was only really able to hear their music – I was not as privy to the band's ins and outs as my father, for example. However, Mark Evans (AC/DC's first bass player) is able to provide the information that I was missing. Evans shows how unique of [...]

2011 was the first year in which I read more new nonfiction than new fiction: the 10 books below are the best of the bunch. As with albums and songs , declaring the year's best books is a subjective enterprise, with the added complication that it takes longer to read a book than to listen to a record. Because each of these books accomplishes its mission to inform and inspire, whether on the topic of crime or politics, food or family, I've resisted the temptation to rank them beyond alphabetical order. Please add your own reading recommendation [...]