Author Archives: garfieldbookreview

Robert Kagan’s latest book, The World America Made, makes such a strong case against American decline that an excerpt published in The New Republic won rave reviews from Barack Obama and commandeered a pre-State of the Union meeting between the President … Continue reading →

Three years after it was published and became an international bestseller, I’m jumping on the The Help bandwagon. I’ll admit that I expected to like the book nowhere near as much as I did; in fact, I picked it up … Continue reading →

Generally speaking, I’m a bit wary of books with more than one author, but Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime is smooth, reading like a less-sharp, less-funny episode of “The West Wing.” … Continue reading →

What the Kindle Daily Deal hath wrought: A couple of weeks ago, I saw the first in Stephenie Meyer’s teenage-vampire YA series, Twilight, online for $1.99. I stared at the screen for a couple of minutes, weighing the reality of … Continue reading →

How do I begin to describe what can only be called an epic horror story, a 1,300-page tome about a demon (or something; we’re never really quite sure) who lives beneath the sewers in the Stephen-King-mainstay town of Derry, Maine, … Continue reading →

I want to begin by pointing everyone who reads this to a piece called “The Autumn of Joan Didion,” by Caitlin Flanagan in the January/February 2012 issue of The Atlantic. I read it before I picked up Didion’s latest book, … Continue reading →

Happy 2012. In a tribute to the late, ever-admirable Christopher Hitchens, I’m reviewing his book (an extended essay, really), Why Orwell Matters, because a.) I will always think Orwell matters and b.) Hitchens was one of Orwell’s more eloquent championers, … Continue reading →

Intellectual dichotomies 101: If you’re not a polymath, you’re doomed to be tarred a dilettante, a tyro nursing a hobby that developed for whatever reason, but one that serves no greater purpose than filling the time you don’t spend on what … Continue reading →

I was a big Stephen King fan in high school. I devoured most of what he’d written, and while a lot of it was schlock, there’s no denying the man is a master storyteller. And in fact, I maintain that Misery, … Continue reading →

It goes without saying that George Orwell is a literary God and one of the most fascinating, brilliant individuals of the twentieth century (and vies with Clarence Darrow and Hitler for the honor of my “preferred dinner companion, living or … Continue reading →