Magic Recommends : Books
The risk for anyone writing a biography about Pierre Berton is that they not deliver a finished product as colorful as the subject. And, for the most part, the author has avoided that potential pitfall. At 681 pages, there will not be much you don’t know about this Canadian icon when you are finished. It misses precious few details, from cradle to grave.
I’ve always been a Steve Martin fan. So I guess that makes me somewhat biased with this review. I thoroughly enjoyed his story. At only 208 pages, there’s not an awful lot of detail, but there’s enough to fill in the blanks. Where did the ‘wild & crazy’ comedy come from. While all the other comedians of the day were doing topical humour, or political humour, or one-liners, Steve Martin was out there making it up as he went along.
First of all, not a legal whodunit.Grisham has written a couple of books that have strayed from his usual tales of courtroom/legal drama. He even has one non-fiction true crime book to his credit, The Innocent Man, which is a very good book.
Every time I go through the fiction section at the bookstore, I always come across an entire library of books by Richard North Patterson. And I always find something else to read.
This time, I decided to give him a try. A great choice. A very good book. A combination murder mystery, political thriller. A Palestinian woman is accused of complicity in the murder of the Prime Minister of Israel. By a twist of fate, her ex-lover, a Jewish Lawyer, has decided to defend her.
John Grisham has written more legal thrillers than we have potholes. As was the case with Robert Ludlum and Stephen King, I used to go through them with reckless abandon and then I reached the point where I’d had enough. I haven’t gone back to King, although I tried with the Dark Tower series, nor have I read another Ludlum. But I had a copy of Grisham’s The Testament, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I’m glad I did.
With all the attention given to one of Oprah’s picks, Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, I thought I would go back and read one of his earlier bestsellers The Key to Rebecca.
“Life isn’t always about safe and comfortable.” That is one of the first lines that Monica Magnetti (pictured), a life coach and business coach who is out with her new manual on how to get ahead in the word, professionally and (by extension) personally.
Jan Wong is a foreign correspondent for the Globe & Mail. Her memories are especially appropriate with the protests in Tibet & the upcoming Beijing Olympics.
In 1972, she left comfy cozy Montreal where her father owned a number of Chinese Restaurants. She left convinced she wanted to find her roots. She also left Canada, a true blue, or should I say, red, Maoist. The west was decadent; capitalism was a plague on mankind. Communism was the answer.
"Truth is stranger than fiction." I think that’s why I prefer non-fiction. Nothing wrong with a good page-turner by Stephen King or Robert Ludlum; or a good legal thriller from John Grisham, but the real stuff can be just as much fun. Ira Glass shows us how in The New Kings of Non-Fiction: a collection of non-fiction stories about the everyday.
I read this while on vacation on a beach in Mexico. I remember lying in my chaise lounge on the beach laughing out loud, spilling my precious corona. Sun-bathers walking by me, thinking I was crazy. It’s not too often I can read a book & laugh out loud. It reads like one of Billy Crystal’s stand-up monologues.
