Tuesday, March 5, 2013

John’s Short Reviews of Long Books

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

This book reads like bad fiction. It’s well written. It’s just that I would have trouble believing the actions and choices of the people in the stories if they were characters in a novel. It’s all true, however. The Church of Scientology is a litigious organization and the author, Lawrence Wright, has been very careful only to use sources that he can document. Highly recommended.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

This book was published in the 1990s. It concerns a wounded soldier who journeys to his love and his home, deserting the Confederate Army once he is sufficiently recovered to leave the hospital. I just read it recently for the first time and am reviewing it because it is the best fictional work on the Civil War, and one of the best works of fiction overall, that I have ever read. It shares its framework in some ways with the Odyssey and looms just as mythically large. The language is beautiful.

John Bickelhaupt, Reference Librarian

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