Author: seanv2
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Review: Brown’s Angels and Demons
Angels & Demons – Movie Tie-In Dan Brown In my attempt to understand America, I read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons 1. It is terribly written. There, I said it. Now to be fair, I don’t know if I could have written it. For many reasons. I couldn’t sustain the level of cliff hanger chapters,…
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Review: Lewis’s the Big Short
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine Michael Lewis It took the movie coming out for me to finally read this great book on the guys who figured out the subprime crash before the subprime crash. I’m not sure why I didn’t read this earlier, I’m a fan of both Michael Lewis and books skewering…
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Review: Winslow’s The Cartel
The Cartel Don Winslow The sequel to Winslow’s page-turner Power of the Dog, the Cartel takes our tale of the Mexican drug trade to the present day and includes the rise of the ultra-violent new breed of narcos such as the Zetas. In writing and character development, perhaps a better book than Power of the…
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Review: Buettner’s Blue Zones
The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest Dan Buettner The first book in the Blue Zone empire. Though it is at times silly, this is a must read for anyone interested in longevity. If you’ve been living under a rock, let me briefly explain the conceit of this…
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Review: Winslow’s Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog Don Winslow Wow, what a read. A top-notch crime writer does the research and takes the time to understand the modern origins of the drug war in Mexico, then tells that story through the lives of petty criminals, cartel bosses, DEA agents and regular people caught up in the drug…
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Review: Chopra’s Shapeshifter
Shapeshifter: The Evolution of a Cricket Fan (awaiting publication) Samir Chopra For many sports fans, myself included, our personal lives are intertwined with the fortunes of millionaires we have never met. I remember watching, with my father, when Brett Favre threw for four hundred yards the night after his own father died. I remember the…
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Review: Kraus’s I Love Dick
I Love Dick (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) Chris Kraus A strange book; it unsettled me. Now, months after finishing it, I’m still not sure what I thought of it. The basic premise is well known – Kraus, filmmaker, theorist, and wife of French theorist Sylvere Lotringer has a short encounter with a theorist…
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Review: Smith’s Just Kids
Just Kids Patti Smith For the first fifty pages, I wasn’t sure about this one, but then something clicked and I couldn’t put this down. By now you know that this is the story of Smith’s early adulthood and her relationship Robert Mapplethorpe. The books starts with Smith as a child in New Jersey and…
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Review: Rankine’s Citizen
Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine I’m really not a poetry guy, but so many brilliant friends recommended this, I had to give it a go. So, so glad I did. A gut wrenching meditation on American racism both systemically, and personally this book had me in awe. Rankine not only makes brutal point after…
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Review: Fox’s The Riddle in the Labyrinth
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code Margalit Fox I’ve been fascinated by the story of decipherment of Linear B, the language originally found by Authur Evans on Crete and eventually deciphered by the troubled amateur Michael Ventris, for years. It was a great puzzle — a sort of black…
Milo and the Calf 