by Philip Rafferty | Sep 5, 2018 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), General Fiction, Historical Fiction
Shortly after WWII, a cameraman for the Nazis, one who worked directly with the famed Leni Riefenstahl, moves his family to Bolivia. Hans Ertl, the patriarch, has not put his camera away, and instead is filming a documentary about a lost city in the Bolivian forest...
by Philip Rafferty | Mar 28, 2018 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Mystery, Crime & Thriller
At the time of his death, in March of 1970, Erle Stanley Gardner was the bestselling American author of the 20th century. Most famous for his character Perry Mason, a sleuthing criminal defense lawyer that invented and defined a genre. Outside of Mason, Gardner’s...
by Philip Rafferty | Feb 2, 2018 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Mystery, Crime & Thriller
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle’s Smile, his 11th novel, opens with middle-aged Victor Forde moving back to his hometown. Victor occupies a small apartment and walks down early each night to a local pub for a pint. One evening he runs into an old school chum, Eddie...
by Philip Rafferty | Dec 15, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Nature, Outdoors & Animals, Science & Technology
How a path traveled by one becomes the path traveled by a few, and to later emerge as a recognized trail, is the heart of the matter in On Trails by Robert Moor. As a thru-hiker of the Appalachian Trail, Moor writes a strong and compelling hybrid, mixing memoir and...
by Philip Rafferty | Nov 14, 2017 | Archived Reviews (pre-April 2020), Biographies & Memoirs, History
The Road to Jonestown, the new book by bestselling author, Jeff Guinn, opens in November of 1978 in Port Kaituma, Guyana. On that fateful day, 900 people collectively took their lives in one of the most infamous, mass ritualistic suicides in modern history. They did...