“Every employee rises to his level of incompetence.” This is the principle introduced in this classic work of humorous but often true insight into the hierarchies of business. The Peter Principle (William Morrow & Company, 1969, 180 pages, $4.95 hardback) by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull is one of eleven books (including a four-volume […]
A Review of “The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong” Read More »
“Sloppy luck.” It’s when fortune saves an individual from a terrible fate, only to make surviving it almost as bad. Like a young man emerging alive from an almost certainly fatal auto accident, only to find his closest friend dead at the scene, and himself facing a prison sentence for his negligence. Palmer Cray believes
A Review of Raymond L. Atkins’s Sweetwater Blues Read More »
When a drifting veteran finds a nervous woman sharing his subway car, he can see that something is wrong with her. Why? Because he is trained to see things like that. But when she takes her own life, he has no idea that she is the key to a mystery involving politics, terrorism, and very dangerous women. Jack Reacher once
A Review of Lee Child’s Gone Tomorrow Read More »
Life Planning is not just about finances. It is a purposeful look at where you are, where you’re going, and how to get there. Living Forward: A Proven Plan to Stop Drifting and Get the Life You Want (Baker, 2016, $21.99 hardback) is a guide to writing a life plan with specific instructions and more. Michael Hyatt is
Forward . . . March! A Review of Living Forward, by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy Read More »
Presence is the theme of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel Here I Am. It is the story of a family’s journey through birth, growth, school, marriage, divorce, war, and death. It is a more or less complete life of the Bloch family, saturated with their Jewish culture and their self-obsession, and dominated by particularly self-obsessed
Bad Choices, Bad Usage: A Review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am Read More »
A detective, especially a master detective, should be full of personality. Such is the case with Emerson Knight, a sort of geeky, less refined version of Sherlock Holmes. And such an extraordinary intellect is bound to need a foil to keep his feet on the earth. Thus Riley Moon, an eager young banker from Texas
More laced with intrigue than blood and gore is the new Michael Bennett thriller from James Patterson, Bullseye. Bennett, blue-collar police detective, gets involved in the hunt for the world’s best assassin, who is somehow tied in with several brilliantly-executed murders, and apparently determined to assassinate the president of the United States. Bullseye (Little, Brown
A Direct Hit: A Review of James Patterson’s Bullseye Read More »
If you like dark, violent novels with a touch of the supernatural and the flavor of a classic detective story, this book is definitely worth your time. The hardened and haunted Charlie Parker, aided by his single-minded associates, follows a New England missing persons case to the heart of Appalachia. He also encounters a strange
Worth the Time: A Review of the John Connolly Novel A Time of Torment Read More »
A young woman spends her days with beautiful things of the past and present, relishing her “book day” each Wednesday, alone in a design gallery full of antiques and rare books. But a part of her is unsettled, restless and conflicted. It takes a dashing young lawyer, his dying grandmother, and a visit to things
‘Further Up and Further In’: A Review of Katherine Reay’s The Brontë Plot Read More »
Stone Barrington finds himself on foreign soil in Stuart Woods’s The Short Forever (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002, $24.95 hardback), and gets tied up with smugglers and dark government agencies, while getting in touch with his old girlfriend and meeting a lovely new one in the bargain. The Short Forever is the eighth in the series
The Short Forever: A Review of the Stuart Woods Novel Read More »
