Columbine, by Dave Cullen

Within hours of the massacre last week at Fort Hood, reporters were asking Dave Cullen if the rampage was “like Columbine.” Cullen cautions that we can’t know yet—that we must wait for the facts. “If we guess now, the myths will be with us forever.”
Cullen knows how hard myths die. He was a reporter at [...]

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Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

Here’s a tale with a bracing lack of ambiguity. It is a shameful story, an incredible story that I wish were a work of fiction.
Abdulrahman Zeitoun exemplified the “American dream.” A Syrian-American citizen who had settled in New Orleans in 1994, he ran his own successful painting and contracting company, and was known to customers [...]

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Friends of Old Time Music: The Folk Arrival 1961-1965

If you think you’re allergic to folk music, here’s the cure. This three-disc anthology of live recordings contains some of the most powerful, soulful music ever made with or without benefit of amplifiers. It’s not folk music in the “folkie” singer-songwriter genre—the performers are mostly Southerners born in the late 19th or early 20th century [...]

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Roseanna, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

A team of Swedish police detectives are trying to solve a murder. It takes months. They start with no clues. They wait for a break in the case. They stare out the window at the rain. They play endless games of chess. They walk the streets of Stockholm after dark, looking up at people in [...]

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Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith

How do you investigate a murder in a society where the very idea of murder is unthinkable? This is the existential challenge confronting Leo Stepanovich Demidov, a Soviet state security (MGB) officer in the latter years of Stalin’s dictatorship. When he finds evidence that a colleague’s young son has been murdered, he covers it up.  [...]

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A Day, a Dog, by Gabrielle Vincent

In Les Miserables, it took Victor Hugo 1400 pages and Lord knows how many words to tell his story of cruelty, suffering, endurance, and redemption. In this masterpiece of sequential art, Gabrielle Vincent accomplishes the same thing in 60 wordless pages.
A Day, a Dog tells a simple story entirely through bold charcoal sketches that [...]

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The Twilight series, by Stephenie Meyer

“You are going to hate it in so many ways,” I told Jessica before she started reading Twilight. I could anticipate the criticisms: sappy romance, amateurish writing, serious transgressions of feminist ethics…
As it turns out, Edward Cullen trumps all of the above. “You didn’t tell me this was a vampire romance,” growled Jessica, who was [...]

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Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, by David Petersen

Ambivalent about rodents? Don’t let that keep you away from the exquisite comic book series, Mouse Guard. Under leaves, behind rocks, in the hollows of trees, a medieval mouse world flourishes. Stonemasons carve mouse tombstones, potters make tiny crockery, bakers bake thumbnail-sized loaves. These settlements, so fragile and threatened by predators, are protected by the [...]

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Revere: Revolution in Silver, by Ed Lavallee and Grant Bond

Listen, my children, and you shall hear… Whoa, hold it right there. This is one Paul Revere story that is not fit for children’s ears or eyes. Revere: Revolution in Silver is scary, gory, and sort of sick, actually. That’s not meant as criticism, just a warning to anyone who might confuse this dark graphic [...]

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The Lymond Chronicles, by Dorothy Dunnett

“It’s a good thing she’s dead.” It was my friend Nora on the phone. Not hello, Penelope, this is Nora, how are you? Just “It’s a good thing she’s dead, or I’d kill her.”
I’d bugged Nora to read the Lymond Chronicles, raving that it was the most intense reading experience of my life. Now Nora [...]

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