Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 15

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Henry Holt, New York, 2013 (352pp.$28) They are a heedlessly aggressive species, territorial without mercy, hierarchical without conscience and, like their evolutionary cousins the chimpanzees, willful murderers of their own kind. Though not endowed by evolution with…

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Theroux, Paul. The Lower River, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, 2012 (336pp.$25) As a young man Paul Theroux spent a number of years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the squalor of Malawi, a landlocked African country squeezed between Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. A writer possessed…

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Amis, Martin. Lionel Asbo: State of England, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012 (255pp.$29.95) Critical abuse and his own mercurial temperament have made Martin Amis the permanent bad boy of English letters, even though he is 62 years old and lives mostly in America. Amis…

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Buck, Rinker. The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015 (450pp. $28.00) Originally known by mountain men, Army scouts and commercial wagon masters as  “The Great Platte River Road”, the Oregon Trail (after 1842 or so) consisted of a spidery…

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Salter, James. All That Is, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013 (290pp.$26.95) James Salter’s first novel in 35 years opens on the deck of a destroyer during the battle for Okinawa in 1944, when young Lieutenant jg Philip Bowman observes his bunkmate Kimmel jump from…

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Thomas, Evan. Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Random House, New York, 2015 (619pp.$35) When Nixon was at Whittier College, a small Quaker institution in southern California, he dated a stunner named Ola Florence, who was socially precocious and, in photos, looks pretty much sexually wiser…

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The sorrows of the digital age include—distraction, lack of focus, continual serial partial attention and the loss of individuality. All of this is, for me, bound up with reading and spirituality. Here’s what I’ve been following lately on this subject. Distraction, Attention, Technology and Individuality:…

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Doctorow, E.L., Andrew’s Brain. Random House, New York, 2014 (200pp. $26)  (E.L. Doctorow, one of America’s greatest writers, died recently.  Here is a review of one of his last books) The bedrock of fiction is social reality. Mostly we readers expect fictional characters to resemble…

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Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Penguin Press, New York, 2015 (447pp.$27.95) The impassioned surfer is a disciplined fanatic. Leaving everyday life behind, the disciplined fanatic abandons family, career, common comforts, romantic love, and even good health in a monomaniacal search for some “ur-experience”,…

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Doctorow, E.L. All the Time in the World: New and Selected Stories, Random House, New York, 2011 (277pp.$26)  (E.L. Doctorow, one of our great American writers, died recently.  In his honor, here is a review of one of his books.) A great short story is…

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