Movie #18 of 2017: Little Evil (2017) The last fifteen minutes or so redeem this movie somewhat, when things take a Good Omens sort of turn and start emphasizing the antichrist child’s free will. But for most of the runtime, it’s a pretty lackluster effort. I think the idea is supposed to be that Adam …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
Book #224 of 2019: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah Given that comedian Trevor Noah has risen to international prominence as Jon Stewart’s successor on The Daily Show, I was expecting this memoir to be a typical rags-to-riches narrative (or at least something like Bossypants where a struggling artist …
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Book Review: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Book #223 of 2017: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1) If you read science-fiction primarily for the science, this is definitely your book, with all sorts of experimental particle physics and theoretical issues in astronomy. There’s just unfortunately not much of a plot or characters worth caring about. The flashbacks …
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Book Review: Night by Elie Wiesel
Book #222 of 2017: Night by Elie Wiesel It’s hard to find the words to describe Elie Wiesel’s memoir of his time in a Nazi concentration camp. No matter what you know about the horrors of the Holocaust — and as a Jew born in the late twentieth-century, those horrors formed part of my earliest …
Book Review: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Book #221 of 2017: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz A Freakonomics for the modern age, this book explores the provocative notion that we can get more reliable information from people’s Google searches and other online activity than from their …
Book Review: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
Book #220 of 2017: The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland This book is a wild blend of Arrival, Timeline, and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, in which a linguistics professor is recruited by a shadowy government agency to translate documents suggesting that magic actually existed in the world before …
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Book Review: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie
Book #219 of 2017: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (Miss Marple #1) The first Miss Marple mystery is as fun as it is implausible, requiring readers to suspend our disbelief enough to accept both that a criminal could be as devious as the denouement reveals and that a town gossip could be …
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Book Review: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Book #218 of 2017: Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt This memoir about growing up dirt-poor (first in Brooklyn, then in Ireland) is tremendously funny and moving in equal measures. I didn’t always care for author Frank McCourt’s conceit of writing from the supposed perspective of his childhood self – largely because there are a lot …
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Book Review: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Book #217 of 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward The prose in this novel is just as lyrically beautiful as Jesmyn Ward’s earlier Salvage the Bones, but the story is more magical realist than southern gothic, and I feel like it suffers for it. The portrait of a Mississippi family dealing with racism, poverty, …
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Book Review: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett
Book #216 of 2017: Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #19) Terry Pratchett’s City Watch novels have been steadily improving as the Discworld sub-series goes along, and this third book continues that happy trend. Whereas the introduction of nonhuman characters into the Watch in the previous volume felt largely like an unfunny joke about …
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The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more 