Title: The Downhill Lie: A Hacker’s Return to a Ruinous Sport
By: Carl Hiassen (Knopf, 207 pp.)
Concerning: Carl Hiassen, the funny-thriller writer and Miami Herald columnist, recounts his infrequent highs and innumerable lows when he takes up golf again after a 32-year absence.
Quote: “Under the circumstances, though, my composure was exemplary - ( Read more... )

Title: Ubik
By: Philip K. Dick (Modern Library; originally published in 1969)
Concerning: A team of “inertials” hired to block the hostile powers of enemy psychics experience a terrifying phenomenon that causes time to run backwards and claims lives of the group one by one.
Quote: [A description of one of the company’s TV commercials] “It shows a ( Read more... )

Title: Lush Life
By: Richard Price (Farrar Straus Giroux, 455 pages)
Concerning: NYPD detective Matty Clark focuses a murder investigation on Eric Cash, a would-be artist/restaurant manager at the scene of the crime.
Quote: “Restless, they finally pull out to honeycomb the narrow streets for an hour of endless tight right turns: falafel joint, ( Read more... )

Title: Dreamers of the Day
By: Mary Doria Russell (Random House, 253 pages)
Concerning: A spinsterish schoolteacher and heiress, having lost her family to the Great War and the Great Influenza, takes a vacation to the Middle East and finds herself on the periphery (and at times in the inner circle) of the Cairo Peace Conference, attended by such ( Read more... )

Title: Out Stealing Horses
By: Per Petterson; translated from the Norwegian* by Anne Born (Graywolf Press, 258 pages)
Concerning: As an elderly widower settles into a remote rural cabin, his memory keeps returning to when he was a teenager at a (different) rural cabin in 1948, a time that forever changed his perspective on friendship, family and ( Read more... )

Title: The Devil in the White City
By: Erik Larson (Crown, 447 pages, 2003)
Concerning: This lively history text follows narratives on two tracks, primarily (but not exclusively) based in Chicago. Track One depicts the tumultuous planning, construction, implementation and aftermath of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (technically the “World ( Read more... )

Title: Them
By: Nathan McCall (Atria Books, 339 pp.)
Concerning: Gentrification leads to class and (especially) racial tensions in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood in this novel. No giant ants, though. (That’s Them!)
Quote: “Houses that went on the market usually were bought, fast, and renovated even faster. Construction crews invaded with ( Read more... )

Title: Superman vs. Hollywood: How Fiendish Producers, Devious Directors and Warring Writers Grounded an American Icon
By: Jake Rossen (Chicago Review Press, 339 pp.)
Concerning: A chronicle of the often calamitous and occasionally successful attempts to adapt the Superman mythos to movies, television and other broadcast media.
Quote: “(Richard ( Read more... )

Title: Duma Key
By: Stephen King (Scribner, 611 pp.)
Concerning: Convalescing after a near-fatal accident (that involves loss of arm and serious head trauma), former building magnate Edgar Freemantle discovers a long-dormant talent for art, as well as long-dormant family mysteries and unearthly horrors in coastal Florida.
Quote: “I spin the Ram’s ( Read more... )

Title: Kennedy’s Brain
By: Henning Mankell, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson (The New Press, 328 pp.)
Concerning: After a middle-aged archeologist discovers the body of her young, idealistic son, she embarks on a globe-trotting mission to discover the truth of his life and death, which leads to the African AIDS crisis (in a U.N. ( Read more... )