BOOK REVIEW – The Best of All Possible Worlds: Lending Heart to Hard Sci-Fi
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February 1, 2013
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
What if a highly cerebral alien race had their planet destroyed in a crazed act of vengeance?
Any science fiction fan cracking open Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds would be justified in asking, “Where have I seen this before?” Yet, despite the similarity of the opening conceit to J.J. Abrams’ “Star Trek” movie, the novel owes a clearer debt to the uninhibited idealism of the original series.
Rather than revenge, the bereaved Sadiri people [...]
BOOK REVIEW – The Particle at the End of the Universe: Uncovering the Higgs Boson
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January 1, 2013
Miriam Laufer
Book Reviewer
Book Review
The world celebrated the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, 2012, but many of the general public still have uncertainties about what the Higgs boson is, what it means, and why we should care about it. Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, is here to answer those questions. He illustrates the concepts clearly, especially for those with “absolute zero” physics knowledge, in The Particle at the End of [...]
BOOK REVIEW – The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook: Celebrate with holiday dishes and recipes
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December 1, 2012
Mirian Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
Photos courtesy of Deb Perelman
“Recipes and Wisdom from an Obsessive Home Cook” is the apt sub-title to this carefully realized work from Deb Perelman, maven of the Smitten Kitchen food blog. The popular site regularly features reflections, recipes, and photos of scrumptious dishes, along with shots of Perelman’s sly-grinning toddler Jacob. The cookbook is dedicated to Jacob, “the best thing I ever baked,” and this family spirit suffuses the entire book, making it especially suitable [...]
BOOK REVIEW – Reading Lolita in Tehran: Celebrated as part of D.C. Reads
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November 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
Reading seems like an ideal pastime for a city where free access to knowledge and culture is cherished, not to mention where so many have long commutes on public transportation. During the storm that hit the area this week, books looked a lot more attractive as their electronic counterparts failed in nearly 400,000 area outages as of Monday night. In an informal survey of 22 DC metro area residents, however, only three had heard of [...]
BOOK REVIEW – The Art Forger: A Fiction Nearly Compelling as the Truth
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October 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
What is a forgery? Where does the fault line between artwork and forgery lie? This is what Claire Roth, the protagonist of B.A. Shapiro’s elegantly layered new novel, The Art Forger, refers to as the craquelure.
Now that Whitey Bulger has been brought to justice, Shapiro, novelist and professor at Northeastern University, turns our attention to Boston’s other great modern mystery—the 1990 art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. At this time, there has been [...]
BOOK REVIEW – Logavina Street: Revisiting a Country Divided by Ethnicity
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September 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
Before Barbara Demick wrote Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, the National Book Award finalist that had readers clutching their children in fear, she was the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood.
Logavina Street, originally published in 1996, was re-issued in 2012 with a new preface, final chapter, and epilogue from the author. Based on Demick’s work as a journalist covering the Bosnian War for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the [...]
BOOK REVIEW – The Coldest War: The second genre-defying thriller in the Milkweed Triptych
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August 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
The Junkman, living alone in East Ham, London in 1963, fantasizes about burning the children who taunt him daily. In his imagination, fireballs erupt from his fingertips and scorch the tiny humans into ash. While reprehensible, his wishes seem implausible–except, in Ian Tregellis’ alternate Britain, the Junkman is not crazy. His name is Reinhardt and, once upon a time, he could shoot fire.
Tregellis’ first novel, Bitter Seeds, introduces World War II in an alternate universe, [...]
BOOK REVIEW – Gilt: Uncanny how mean teenage girls have not changed
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July 2, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
In this smart, hip criticism of modern girl culture, Katherine Longshore transports “Mean Girls” to Tudor England. Gilt opens in the dressing rooms at Norfolk House in 1539, where two teenage girls named Cat and Kitty rummage. If they are caught, their punishment could involve flogging, the pillory, or loss of a hand. The outsized consequences for youthful pranks are a reverberating theme throughout the novel, which illuminates the brief life of [...]
BOOK REVIEW – Dr. Victoria Sweet: Using “God’s Hotel” to crusade for good food, rest and emotional health
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June 1, 2012
By Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
Laguna Honda Hospital casts a spell. That spell made Dr. Victoria Sweet, who came to work at the hospital for two months, stay for twenty years. That same spell will keep readers turning the pages of her new book, God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. The “amalgam” of “the ramshackle building” and its patients inspired Sweet to write God’s Hotel, which functions both as a history [...]
BOOK REVIEW – Elizabeth Bear: In an alien world, creating deeply human characters in “Range of Ghosts”
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May 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
What does a wizard, a group of people who treat horses like family, a giant bird, and a ring with powers to make a person invisible have in common? They are all in the novel Range of Ghosts. The world of Elizabeth Bear’s new Eternal Sky series is not Middle Earth, but is equally vivid, self-contained, and epic. Range of Ghosts is the first novel in the sequence, although two related novellas Bone and Jewel [...]
Wieherdt: Tips on moving in with your partner
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April 1, 2012
by Adam Wieherdt
Contributing Writer
Living the Life
For 12 years now I have been paying attention to a certain step in a relationship that has a lot of stigma around it: moving in together. Deciding it is time for you and your partner to actually live together is a big step. In most cases, couples are excited about it. They have spent a lot of time together so they feel that living [...]
BOOK REVIEW: Forgotten Country: Putting Catherine Chung in a literary league of her own
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April 1, 2012
Miriam Laufer
Book Critic
Book Review
“The year that Hannah disappeared, the first frost came early, killing everything in the garden,” opens Catherine Chung’s debut novel Forgotten Country. The cyclical imagery of the garden and that mathematical precision of language are woven throughout Chung’s tale of two Korean-American sisters who, caught between the same two worlds, choose different paths for themselves. The forgotten country of the title refers both to the Korea from which their parents came — before the country [...]