Men's Book Discussion 2009 - 2012
December 2012
October 2012
September 2012
August 2012
June 2012
May 2012
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (Paperback)
April 2012
March 2012
February 2012
January 2012
November 2011
October 2011
September 2011
July 2011 2.5 for Interest, and 4 for Readability
June 2011
May 2011
April 2011
All of us gave the book a 5 for both Readability and Interest, and we all said we would read something else by Portis. Someone noted that this is the second book we've read in which a male author has written through the eyes of a female protagonist. The first was One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus. Both were also fiction (though Fergus's book is historical fiction to some extent), and both were set in the "old West" (but, again, with Fergus's book being in the waning years of that period).
March 2011 One of the group's most enjoyed books ranking 5 out of 5 for interest and 4.9 out of 5 for readability.
February 2011
January 2011
December 2010
November 2010
October 2010
3.7 out of 5 for Interest and 3.4 out of 5 for Readability
September 2010
2.6 out of 5 for Interest and 2.3 out of 5 for Readibility
August 2010
June 2010
May 2010 Jefferey Deaver doesn't know about Wisconsin. That's the prevailing opinion about The Bodies Left Behind, which we reviewed at the Rivers Eatery. Most of us "enjoyed" the book in so far as it was an engaging plot, a fast-paced story, and a quick read, but we were not impressed with Mr. Deaver's lack of accuracy about Wisconsin's landscape, which was the story's setting. His poor knowledge of local plants jolted us out of the story, and we were REALLLY not impressed when a wolf encounter led one of the characters to recall that wolves "were being reintroduced into the state" (p. 169). (Fact - wolves returned to Wisconsin on their own; they were not re-introduced.) It should come as no surprise, then, that our ratings were the lowest we have given to any book this year. On a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (great), this book ranked 3.75 for Readability and 2.8 for Interest.
April 2010 Everyone enjoyed The River of Doubt by Candice Millard. Barry said it he feels it's the best book our group has read. Average score (scale of 1-5, respondents=6) for Readability was 4.5, while Interest rated a 4.9. As with previous books, however, we felt there needed to be more maps included.
March 2010 Readability: 4 stars; Interest: 4 stars (both out of five stars)
February 2010 (4.5 stars, out of five, for readability and 4.5 stars for interest)
January 2010 (4.7 stars, out of five, for readability and 4 stars for interest)
November 2009
October 2009
August 2009
Fiction. Native American Studies. MIKO KINGS: AN INDIAN BASEBALL STORY is an homage to the dusty roads and wind-blown diamonds of America's first moving picture about baseball, His Last Game.
Seth Kantner's "Ordinary Wolves" told the story of a white boy raised in a sod igloo on the Arctic tundra. A heartbreaking vision of a vanishing world, it established Kantner as one of the nation's most original and authentic writers. Here, he returns to the setting of his debut novel with an autobiographical account of his own life in a rapidly changing land.