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Dear Reader, In August 1992, a brutal 11-day FBI siege on a private family home near Naples, Idaho, leaving 3 dead and two wounded, shocked the country. This incident, now known as Ruby Ridge, resulted from a failed ambush that was intended to facilitate the arrest of Randy Weaver for a variety of offenses including... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Have you ever dissuaded yourself from reading a book because you found it to be too popular? For me, this is where my hesitancy lie when I was considering Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. Despite near universal praise for this story, the premise of a... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, It is deeply unsettling to learn that the person that you have come to know and call a friend is nothing more than an illusion. When Rachel DeLoache Williams went on what she thought was an all-expenses-paid vacation with her friends, Anna, Casey, and Jesse, to Morocco, she did not expect that this... Continue Reading →
Dear, Reader It is often the case that after death the deceased is held in higher regard than he was while living. Yet rarely is anyone upraised to the status of legend. This, however, is how many view the wise-beyond-his-years and gone-before-his-time Chris McCandless. Maybe we are captivated by him for his unshakable resolve, propensity... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, We meet Stephanie Land in a homeless shelter as her daughter learns to walk. She only has $10 in her bank account and is soon moving into transitional emergency housing. In the 2019 best-selling book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, we see Land's struggle to provide a... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Every once in a while, you start into a book not knowing what you are getting yourself into. This is precisely what happened to me when I began reading Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino. Initially, I believed this book to be an analysis on the many ways we humans indulge... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, Every once in a while, you will pick up a book, read two sentences of the summary and think to yourself “no thanks, next!” That is how I felt when I initially encountered The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, “I’m haunted every day by what I did as an economic hit man (EHM).” Those are John Perkins’s opening words of his autobiographical tell-all The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. While the book cover and title initially drew me into this story, I was a little hesitant that this was a... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, There are some big-name authors out there. Literally, writers like Stephen King, James Patterson, and Lee Child have their names printed just as big (if not bigger) than the titles of their books on the cover. In this way, just seeing a familiar surname is like a quality-assurance or brand marker for the... Continue Reading →
Dear Reader, When you think of Russia, you probably conjure images in your mind of the Kremlin, Putin, or even the Russian ballet. I do to, and I’ve actually been to Russia a few times. However, as the greatest landmass in the world, Russia has more to offer than just Moscow. Today, I will review... Continue Reading →
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