The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

Very rarely does a book live up to the hype...

Published in 2008.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY:

The New York Times Book Review

The Washington Post

San Francisco Chronicle

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award

You know how it is. You get a book because the blurbs on the cover tell you it is the most wonderful book since Stephen King was in diapers. This one has the audacity to have comparisons to Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn and Robert Louis Stevenson.

To be honest, I picked up The Good Thief figuring it would be wrong and I would skewer it in this review.

Well, I am pleased to say that I was wrong. This book DOES live up to that hype. It does belong in that august and lofty crowd. Somehow it pulls off being filled with literary allusions and homages to other works and being a unique work of its own.

There are multiple literary allusions that I noted, including Treasure Island, Sleepy Hollow, Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, A Clockwork Orange, Faust, Milton and Terminator 2.

So, in short, pick it up. This one is a unique winner.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti.

Reviewed on August 18, 2008.

My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast

A great piece of historical fiction - strongly recommended

Originally published in 1948.

When I teach world history I always give my students a project in which they are to read a piece of historical fiction and do a bit of research. This book is exactly the type of book I recommend for them to read and why I created the project in the first place. My Glorious Brothers is well-written and re-creates a little bit of the historical world for the reader.

Set in 2nd Century B.C. Israel, this is a story of national liberation and freedom of religious expression. Many Protestants will be unfamiliar with the Maccabees since Maccabees 1-4 is not included in the Protestant Bible. This book is an ideal place to start to explore that time between the exile in Babylon and the Roman occupation that is featured in the New Testament.

The main characters are 5 brothers and their father, descendants of the Tribe of Levi. They refuse to be "civilized" by Hellenized (Greek-influenced) Syrians - they want to keep their old traditions and religion. They revolt against too many taxes, too many injustices and being forced to worship Greek gods. ("Thus they 'Hellenized' us, not with beauty and wisdom, but with fear and terror and hate." - p. 33)

Howard Fast (1914-2003)

I strongly recommend this one. Despite being more than 60 years old, this book can stand on its own among newer and more popular works about the ancient world such as Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae in both its battlefield descriptions and its cultural explorations.

Quote from the book I particularly liked this line based on a Bible verse from the Old Testament book of Micah: "What does the Lord require from a man, but that he should walk humbly and love righteousness?" (p. 142)

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: My Glorious Brothers. 

Reviewed on August 19, 2008.

Prey by Michael Crichton

A bit of smartly done, high-tech adventure

Published in 2002.

Michael Crichton is re-visiting some old stomping grounds in Prey. The 1970s sci-fi movie classic Westworld was written and directed by Crichton and it features technology run amok and set loose on a killing spree. Jurassic Park features the dangers of tampering with the gene pool with an ensuing killing spree.

Prey, in many ways, is a combination of the two - the dangers of nanotechnology, specifically the dangers of using bacteria in combination with tiny, tiny bits of technology to create something new. The problem is, of course, the same problem that he pointed out in Westworld and Jurassic Park: Things never turn out the way you think they will.

Michael Crichton
(1942-2008)

Is this a Pulitzer Prize winner? Hardly. But, it is a creepy thriller with some good points about science, the dangers of unintended consequences and some good thrills and chills. I enjoyed this one thoroughly.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Prey

Reviewed on August 20, 2008.

Note: This book turned up on a "banned book" list in Texas. Ugh.

Liberty's Children: Stories of Eleven Revolutionary War Children by Scotti Cohn

It just didn't work for me

Published in 2004 by Globe Pequot

Liberty's Children is a collection of stories about the experiences of eleven children during the Revolutionary War (although one is 20 years old, which was definitely not a child in a time when many were married with children at age 16).

The book is well-researched and accurate. I have no complaints with that or the ample bibliography that is sorted by the individual children. But, I just felt like I had to slog through parts of it and I love to read history.

I questioned some of the choices as well. Five of the eleven went off to sea, one of them was 20 years old and one was just a baby. I found myself wondering about the decision not to include the most famous child that served in the Revolutionary War, Andrew Jackson. He served as a courier and had his face slashed by a British soldier for refusing to clean his boots. Or, how about John Quincy Adams, who accompanied his father to Europe during the war to secure supplies and allies and eventually travelled all of the way to Russia. At least Sybil Luddington, the 16 year-old female "Paul Revere" for Connecticut who is featured on Connecticut's quarter coin could have been included rather than another story about a boy gone off to sea.

Not that all of the stories were a chore to read, mind you. I enjoyed the stories of Frances Slocum, James Forten and Sally Wister in particular. If you have read this book and want to know more about Frances Slocum I enthusiastically recommend the novel The Red Heart by James Alexander Thom.

I rate this collection 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Liberty's Children.

Reviewed on August 23, 2008.

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman

Where were you when you discovered the world was flat?

Originally published in 2005. 
Revised and updated versions released in 2006 and 2007.

I've taken a number of economics classes and I've tried to tell people about what I have learned about globalization as a reality. Friedman likes to ask people when they learned that the "world was flat", meaning when they learned that the advent of cheap instantaneous technology coupled with lowering trade barriers, and the fall of many political barriers (like the Berlin Wall) has made the world a very small, very competitive place, indeed. 

Well, I learned the world was flat last summer when one of my econ classes visited a Subaru plant in Lafayette, Indiana. When I tried to tell people who have not taken economics lately about global supply chains and comparative advantage they looked at me like I was a babbling fool. Now, my mom has read this book and now she suddenly understands my economic babblings and we speak the same language.

Thomas Friedman

What kind of book is The World Is Flat? Well-written, often funny, well-researched, full of interesting facts and, perhaps, a glimpse at the future. I followed my wife around the house reading passages to her - and she didn't tell me to get lost! I must have told 15 people to get this book and read it.

Do I agree with everything in it? No. I think he fundamentally misunderstands George W. Bush (it's just two pages so don't let that offend you or thrill you - it really is not a big part of the book), which is surprising because he really, really understands the threat of Al-Qaeda and bin Laden and explains the rise of the Islamo-Leninists (a.k.a. Islamo-fascists in other circles).

This book is a chunk (469 pages of text) but it is very readable. Friedman makes the complex really quite simple (although this "world is flat" stuff isn't that hard once you get it) and usually doesn't over explain things. Once or twice I found myself skimming passages, but this is no dry textbook.

Couple this book with Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and you have a lot of food for thought to mull over the rest of the summer.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The World is Flat.

Reviewed on July 5, 2006.

Review updated on December 28, 2025.

Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

The Good News: It's a Robert B. Parker Book...

Published in 2006.

The Bad News: It's not a particularly good one.

However, Robert B. Parker's books remind me of those bumper stickers that say 'A Bad Day Fishing is Better Than a Good Day at Work.'

A bad Jesse Stone book is still a fun read.

In Sea Change Stone's police department is investigating a woman's body found floating in the harbor. Along the way, Stone discovers lots of perversion, money, yachts and messed-up rich kids. Or, as his psychologist puts it, Stone is working on a case 'in which control and loveless sexual objectification is rampant.'

Stone comments that pornography is fun for about the first 10 seconds and then it loses most of its appeal for him (he has to wade through hours of personal videotapes of the stuff in the search for victims and suspects) because it gets so repetitive. Unfortunately, this book has the same problem. Lots of sex parties and videotape. Lots of rich boys, easy girls and videotape. The problem is that the story just gets stuck in a rut for about a hundred pages or so. The dialogue is wonderful. The observations are witty. At one point, though, I realized that I was just reading for the witty dialogue and the observations - not for the plot.

Too bad. The last Jesse Stone novel I read was one of the best novels Parker had written, in my opinion. This one goes in the lower half of that long, long list of books.

As has been the case for several of Parker's books now, the book seems quite hefty when you pick it up. However, open it up and it reminds me of when a college student tries to pad the length of his paper by enlarging the margins and the font size. This book features large print, extra thick paper, lots of space between each line and full one inch margins. Each chapter also starts about 2/3 of the way down the page and there are 62 chapters, so that's a good way to stretch it out an extra 30 pages or so. Not that it makes any difference, but I wonder why they've done this. It weighs in at 296 pages and could have easily have been printed in a 200 page format without straining the eyes. This little one-day read is wider than most textbooks! This has to be more expensive, it adds to shipping costs and makes it harder for the stores to stock multiple copies...

I rate this book 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Sea Change (Jesse Stone Novels)

Reviewed on June 22, 2006.

Lawn Boy and Lawn Boy Returns by Gary Paulsen

Lots of fun and you learn a little about economics along the way

Published in 2009 and 2011.

Beloved YA author Gary Paulsen (Hatchet) shows a side I was not aware that he had: a madcap sense or humor (he may have lots of funny books, but the ones I am aware of are not particularly funny). I am not much of a reader of YA books, but my daughter was reading Lawn Boy and she was laughing out loud so much and begging to read passages to my wife and I that I decided to look into it. When I saw on the back of Lawn Boy Returns that the series had been named a Notable Book by the National Council for the Social Studies I was certainly intrigued. I discovered a simple, fun book that just about any kid would love to read that could also easily be incorporated into an economics lesson (in fact, here's a sample I discovered online: click here).

The book follows a pretty simple idea - a 12 year-old boy is given his deceased grandfather's small lawn mower. He mows his family's tiny lawn just to try it out and he is offered the chance to get paid to mow a neighbor's lawn. He decides he needs some money to buy a new inner tube for his bicycle tire so he might as well  go for it. One job leads to another and because the local lawn service owner has recently left town with the wife of one of his customers there are a lot of lawns that need servicing. There are so many lawns that "Lawn Boy" has multiple adult employees, a stockbroker advising him and more money than he knows what to do with.

Gary Paulsen

When his stockbroker gets lucky with a couple of penny stocks and then accidentally invests in a prize fighter the fun really starts. As his stockbroker (my favorite character for his unabashed love of capitalism and his short, odd explanations) notes to Lawn Boy, "You have had a very groovy month..."

Of course, the ridiculous amount of money that "Lawn Boy" generates in just a few weeks is unrealistic, the beauty of the book is that it could happen if this happens and that happens and everything aligns just right. If...if..if.  Paulsen names most chapters after an economic (or business) concept. For example, Chapter 3 of Lawn Boy is called "The Law of Increasing Product Demand Versus Flat Production Capacity" (the chapter where he adds employees because he can no longer service all of the lawns by himself). What a chapter to introduce supply and demand and how business deals with excess demand!

Anyway, the economics teacher in me got all excited about Lawn Boy. The avid reader in me liked it even more - a book that is fun to read that actually teaches something!

I rate this series 5 stars out of 5. Both books can be found on Amazon.com here: Lawn Boy and Lawn Boy Returns. 

Reviewed on July 18, 2011.