It’s very good, particularly since Cobb isn’t a player I had much interest in, beyond wondering why the hell nobody stood up to his crazy ass in twenty-odd seasons and traded him or suspended him …

The prose is a bit choppy in places, but it really carries you along — O’Nan is very skilled at giving a sense of the chaos and terror without overwriting.   He’s also quite good …

Interesting, although I don’t agree with some of the implications and I don’t love that it refuses to draw any conclusions.   I think it’s generally agreed at this point that Hauptmann didn’t act alone, …

It’s very good — but the Plimpton oral history gives you a better sense of him, and you don’t need both.   (7/1/06)

Listy in spots, but Lechner undertook his watch-twelve-TVs-for-a-week experiment the same week Mighty Big TV launched back in 1999, so that’s a nifty time capsule; the writing is not the deftest, but given the parameters, …

A Hitchcock short-story compilation (remember when he had his brand on everything — books, TV shows, everything?).   I don’t usually read much detective/suspense fiction, but the old-school stuff is good; the diction is more …

Lovely, friendly, quick read.   Not what you might expect from Roald Dahl and all the more winning for it.   (8/10/05)

The apple chapter is brilliant, the tulip chapter is less brilliant but still entertaining, and the marijuana section — I have to doff my cap to Michael Pollan.   He’s able to write ably about …

The cross-cutting is a little heavy-handed for me, but it works better and gets more fluid as the book goes on, and the portrayal of Jane is pitch-perfect.   The woman is maddening.   So …

Brooks is a really sharp writer; he’s exact, but he doesn’t get bogged down, and he pokes fun at the Bobos, but not meanly.   His account of visiting the REI store in Seattle is …