This is perhaps best described as the Wes Anderson Movie That's Yet To Be Made. Roberts has been a cartoonist for THE NEW YORKER for over 25 years and her quirky illustrations (kimono-clad squirrels!) for her even stranger text combine to tell the very Wes-ish story of a wealthy, eccentric family fallen on hard times who take up residence...with their servants and pets...in Central Park until things sort themselves out. This might sound too sweet to stomach, but it's really not;it somehow actually becomes quite moving and insightful.

Nerds love Science and Numbers and Computers while their brother Geeks are jazzed about Comics and Sci-Fi. Kakalios has penned a witty, surprisingly complex history and explanation of Nerd Stuff for Geeks. In these pages, Heisenberg Meets Buck Rogers, Einstein pals around with Dagwood, and Schrodinger's Cat is the Case Dick Tracy Was Born to Solve.

Sure, this collection is 'historically significant': it collects five seminal SF novels that might otherwise have been tossed out with all those old paperpacks you couldn't be bothered to take with you when you got your first job after college. But what stands out for me is how darn entertaining and timely these books remain even 60 years later. These guys (Robert Heinlein, Alred Bester, Fritz Leiber, et. al.) could really WRITE: slangy, energetic, clever prose with ideas just bubbling off every page. You come away with the impression that the reason the authors in that era wrote so fast was not only because they needed the dough (they did, of course) but because they had to whip along just to keep up with the pace of their own insights and speculations.

THE BONES OF THE OLD ONES
by Howard Andrew Jones
2012

Check Our Catalog

A rousing adventure tale in the tradition of The Arabian Nights; that pretty much says it all, really. Scholar and Swordsman team up to rescue a beautiful Persian noblewoman and battle magic, villains, and the World's Worst Winter along the way. Jones has a thorough understanding of the tradition in which he is writing, and he builds upon it with some crafty surprises while honoring it by never winking at us as he does so.

Macintyre has told marvelously compelling true stories of the shenanigans of WW2 spies and secret agents before, of course, but this time he does it with the War's biggest stage as his backdrop and he's more than up to the task. Here the truth is not merely stranger than fiction, it's also more inventive and really just plain loonier as well. This is the jawdropping tale of how the 'fake' invasion ensured the real one's success, and you shouldn't let the fun you're having reading about it allow you to overlook how much real, honest history is being accomplished here as well.

If you don't already know the whipsmart, outrageous, alternately insightful and annoying Prof. Paglia, this is a good place to engage her since even if you can't stand some of what she says, the reproductions of 29 of some of the world's great works of visual art are a treat to look at nonetheless. But for me, Paglia's writing...zippy and full of wit and observation...is the 30th great artwork in the book. (Even if she is just plain out of her gourd when she argues at the end that the mantle of Visual Creativity has been legitimately assumed by George Lucas as seen in, hold onto something, the final scenes of Revenge of The Sith. I mean, she's nuts, right? Or maybe not.. She makes me give honest consideration to batty notions and that's her genius.)

According to Evan Thomas, President Eisenhower's reputation for being a bland old golfplaying fuddy-duddy may just have been an elaborate con game designed to throw his opponents off the track. If it was then it's just one of several such schemes Devious Dwight devised as he manipulated his way between the Rock (the Military Industrial Complex he first identified and named) and A Hard Place (America's Postwar Enemies). Thomas has a background in writing for both TIME and NEWSWEEK and that same easy, popular style keeps the many strands of his story here always clear and involving.

THE LITTLE BOOKSTORE OF BIG STONE GAP: A MEMOIR OF FRIENDSHIP, COMMUNITY, AND THE UNCOMMON PLEASURE OF A GOOD BOOK
By Wendy Welch
2012

Check Our Catalog

Husband and wife jettison their fast-track lifestyle to start an old-fashioned (Is there any other kind in the 21st Century?) bookstore in the foothills of Appalachia. Given that it has a premise that sounds like a reasonably amusing, quirky sitcom that would be axed after 13 episodes, I was happily surprised at how engaging and insightful this turned out to be. Other reviewers have noted the gently humorous style and the appeal of the central characters, but what stands out for me is the specificity of detail that enables it to transcend its generic foundation. The book balances the business of the store with the stories of its customers and the books they love and hate in a way that's appealing intellectually, emotionally, and a 'I've Got To Read This Out Loud To My Fellow Booklover' way as well.

If evolution is all about Survival of the Fittest, then why are people (and other living things) ever kind to each other? That's the question George Price set out to explore and his triumphant, tragic life mirrored the answer he found in complex ways. This is not 'just' a compelling biography of a special man, however; it's also a philosophical, scientific, and cultural history of the mystery of Kindness and of the many attempts to account for its existence.

I read, watch...consume...a great deal of stuff that calls itself Humorous, and I rarely find much of it very amusing. So when I tell you that this book made me smile, chuckle, snort, and guffaw while also catching me up in an involving story of a bright teenager in search of her runaway mom, you should take that endorsement of humor seriously. And when I add that the book's wicked satirical tone somehow manages also to be warm and forgiving, you might suspect (as I do) that this is some sort of modern day Comic Masterpiece.