Nancy Pearl Book Reviews Podcast: Episodes
Nancy Pearl discovers the joys of geocaching and the rich rewards of well done picture books with Richard Louv and Uri Shulevitz.
Author Bruce Barcott's new book about saving an extraordinary creature called the Scarlet Macaw and the latest book by Steve Coll about the Bin Laden family of Saudia Arabia make for absorbing reading.
Author and essayist Michael Chabon encourages his readers to think more broadly about what constitutes good literature. And a ghost story that Nancy Pearl describes as "loopy and heart warming."
Author James McBride's latest novel is a historically rich page turner full of complex characters. Also the prolific and popular author of many a western Louis L'Amour was a great advocate of the reading life.
A gifted writer's contemplation of her father's suicide is the book Nancy Pearl shares with us this week.
We hear some of the recent reading adventures of Nancy Pearl: A turn of the 21st century novel set along the China, North Korea border, and some new essays in technology.
Eric Rohmann gracefully combines a sweet story and irresistible pictures with a comforting message to children about facing new experiences in his book <strong>A Kitten Tale</strong>. With the changing of the seasons from spring to summer, and then on to autumn, three little kittens start to worry about ...
In a Ross MacDonald novel the past is never far away. The sins of the fathers (and/or mothers) are always, always, visited on the next generation. Andrew Meier's mystery manages to follow a series of faint clues and reconstruct Cy Oggins' story: one of youthful idealism, a story that ended with his betrayal, ...
This week, Nancy Pearl reviews two books that explore the effects of travel, one through the countryside, the other through travel.
Author Janet Lee Carey brings us a page–turning fantasy filled with well–drawn, three dimensional characters in her book "Dragon's Keep" and Stephen Carter brings us his third novel, "Palace Council."
A collection of fantasy novels that will engage readers age ten and up, and Georgette Heyer's stories will lift you out of a 'fit of dismals.'
Poetry by Grace Paley and Sarah Manguso reviewed by Nancy Pearl.
Salley Vickers shows how each choice one makes is like a pebble thrown into a pond, causing ripples to spread out, inexorably, from the here and now into the future. Stanley Weintraub's book provides readers with a good sense of the nature of each man, as well as the interconnections between the three.
Remember Robert Redford in the film <em>Out of Africa</em>? Meryl Streep did her usual superb job of inhabiting the character of Isak Dinesen, but when I finished Sara Wheeler's engrossing and fluent <strong>Too Close to the Sun: The Audacious Life and Times of Denys Finch Hatton</strong> (Random House, ...
This week Nancy reviews Susan Marie Swanson's poem for children, and Jean Thompson's stories about women who are all trying to navigate their way through their lives.
Maggie O'Farrell's <strong>The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox</strong> (Harcourt, 2007) is sad and haunting, but at the same time it's somehow redemptive in its portrait of a woman who holds onto her sense of self through decades of incarceration in a mental hospital. Or does she?
From serial killers to artificial intelligence, Nancy Pearl finds two good reads this week from Fred Vargas and Frederik Pohl.
There are some experiences and places that will connect to other people forever whether you want that connection or not. Those same connections happen fiction too.
I'm a firm believer that you learn something from every book you read, be it fiction or nonfiction, whether it's a bit of history of which you were unaware, or a deeper understanding of human behavior. I certainly learned something from <strong>The Konkans</strong> (Harcourt, 2008), Tony d'Souza's second ...
In <strong>Garden Spells</strong> (Bantam, 2007), Sarah Addison Allen has written a light and heart–warming romance that's sweet but not cloying, and thoroughly satisfying: in short, a fantasy that just could be real.