book reviews

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'Review Bombing' Costs Author Her Book Deal

Cait Corrain used multiple pseudonyms on Goodreads

(Newser) - A debut author who used fake accounts to "review bomb" other writers on the influential online platform Goodreads has been dropped by her agent and had her book deal cancelled. Cait Corrain's novel Crown of Starlight had been scheduled to come out next year through Del Rey, a...

32 Years Later, Grisham Has Sequel to The Firm
32 Years Later, Grisham
Has Sequel to The Firm
book review
Oct 16, 2023 1:47 PM CDT

32 Years Later, Grisham Has Sequel to The Firm

'The Exchange' catches up with character Mitch McDeere

(Newser) - Thirty-two years after The Firm launched his career as a legal novelist who churns out bestselling books that almost invariably become movies, John Grisham returns with a sequel featuring Mitch McDeere from the original book. In The Exchange, it's 2000 and McDeere is now a high-powered partner at the...

Title of New Climate Change Book Says It All: False Alarm

US economist Joseph Stiglitz takes issue with Bjorn Lomborg's new book on how to battle climate change

(Newser) - Bjorn Lomborg has dropped another bomb in the climate-change debate, and one economist is rushing to defuse it. "As a matter of policy, I typically decline to review books that deserve to be panned. You only make enemies," writes Joseph Stiglitz in his New York Times review of...

'Most Feared Woman in Publishing' Steps Down

'NYT' book critic Michiko Kakutani will now write about politics and culture

(Newser) - A heavyweight in publishing whose words could turn a book into a bestseller or a bomb is stepping down. Chief New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani has taken a voluntary buyout and will step down from her post—a move that "will instantly change the shape of the...

Sheryl Sandberg's New Book a 'Remarkable Achievement'
Sheryl Sandberg's
New Book a
'Remarkable
Achievement'
BOOK REVIEW
Apr 24, 2017 3:40 PM CDT

Sheryl Sandberg's New Book a 'Remarkable Achievement'

Facebook COO's tome on handling grief, finding joy after huge loss strikes chord

(Newser) - Sheryl Sandberg credits Mark Zuckerberg with helping her survive after husband Dave Goldberg's death in 2015 from a heart attack, a fact she recently revealed in an interview to promote her new book , Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, released Monday by Knopf. Now that the...

Megyn Kelly Disagrees With NYT Review of Her Book

Tweets that she doesn't think Fox leaked questions to Trump

(Newser) - Megyn Kelly's memoir is out next week, and she doesn't appear happy with parts of a review that appears Friday in the New York Times . Kelly took to Twitter to clarify two things: She doesn't think she was poisoned the morning of the first GOP debate, and...

Tale of Amazon's Most Prolific Book Reviewer Ends

People either loved Harriet Klausner or loved to hate her

(Newser) - Former librarian Harriet Klausner died on Oct. 15 at age 63, leaving behind 31,014 book reviews on Amazon and a host of critics. Klausner, who started posting reviews on the site in the 1990s and published her last three days before her death, described herself as a "freaky...

Emily Dickinson’s 'Envelope Poems' Revealed

Envelope poems showcase another side of poet's artistry

(Newser) - Emily Dickinson's use of small, often oddly-shaped bits of paper torn from 19th-century envelopes—on which she wrote sentences, stanzas, and entire rough poems in pencil—have been published, as a group, for the first time. Historian Marta Werner first came across one in the 1990s. Known as the...

Amazon Deletes Thousands of 'Fake' Reviews

Online purge sparks debate among authors and fans

(Newser) - Those glowing reviews on Amazon.com that seem a little made-up? The online mega-retailer is finally cracking down, deleting thousands of reviews that strike a phony chord for one reason or another, the New York Times reports. Amazon isn't divulging its deletion policy, but reviews by friends and family...

Your 'Inner Psychopath' Could Make You a Big Success

A book by Kevin Dutton looks to learn from nutcases

(Newser) - What psychopaths have too much of, we could all use in small doses—or so argues Kevin Dutton in a new book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths. Easy charm, unassailable self-confidence, outsize ego, and resistance to self-blame are among the qualities that horrify us in Anders Breivik, say, but seem...

Crime Writer Caught Faking Amazon Reviews

Best-seller RJ Ellory apologizes for 'judgement lapse'

(Newser) - Best-sellling crime writer RJ Ellory has been caught writing favorable reviews of his own books on Amazon.com—and penning scathing reviews of his competitors' books. The British writer was exposed by spy thriller author Jeremy Duns, who blew the whistle on Ellory on Twitter , reports ABC . "Ellory writes...

Tina Fey's Memoir 'Bossypants': A Funny Failure?

 Tina Fey Memoir: 
 A Funny Failure? 
book review
Apr 4, 2011 8:52 AM CDT

Tina Fey Memoir: A Funny Failure?

Critics divided over Bossypants as autobiography

(Newser) - It’s no surprise that Tina Fey’s autobiography, Bossypants, is hilarious; on that much critics agree. But there’s some dissent over whether it does its job as a memoir:
  • “The most successful autobiographies demand a certain amount of psychic heavy lifting, risk taking, and interrogation of one’
...

Mohandas Ghandi Biography: Book Says Indian Independence Leader Was Politically Inept, Self-Important, Sexually Deviant
 Gandhi Was a 
 Big Jerk, Perv 
Book Review
Mar 27, 2011 8:48 AM CDT

Gandhi Was a Big Jerk, Perv

Biography seeks to end hagiography of the leader of Indian independence

(Newser) - Mohandas Gandhi may have been a great man, leading India to independence, but he was also a great jerk, leading a life of racism, self-promotion, sexual weirdness, and cruelty—or so says the new biography Great Soul, by former New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld. Gandhi's early biographers dubbed...

Writer Sues for Libel Over Bad Book Review

Karin N. Calvo-Goller says the 4-paragraph review hurt her reputation

(Newser) - No author likes a bad review, but one academic decided to do something about it—she sued. Even more unusual, the Israel-based writer of an English-language book by a Dutch publisher that was reviewed in 2007 by a German professor for an American journal decided to sue in a French...

The Best Books of 2010
 The Best Books of 2010 
Year in Review
Dec 4, 2010 12:00 PM CST

The Best Books of 2010

The New York Times Book Review picks out its favorites

(Newser) - The year's coming to a close and you know what that means: Best-of lists! The New York Times Book Review kicks things off with a list of the year's top books. Including: Fiction
  • Freedom, Jonathan Franzen—“Even richer and deeper” than The Corrections, this Bush-era Midwestern family saga perfectly
...

Justice Stevens Explains Shift on Death Penalty

Former supporter cites racism, politics, judicial activism

(Newser) - Former Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens is making clear for the first time why he switched course on the death penalty in 2008, calling it unconstitutional, the New York Times reports. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Stevens, who supported capital punishment in 1976, reveals his revised...

How an Affair Gave Us the Emily Dickinson We Love

Why her brother's trysts with Mabel Loomis Todd matter

(Newser) - Salacious things were afoot in Emily Dickinson's family home: During the last two years of her life, her married brother, Austin, would leave his house next-door under the pretense of calling on his sisters—but instead would have sex with the also-married Mabel Loomis Todd on the dining room couch...

Amazon, Change Your Dumb Book Review Policy
Amazon, Change Your
Dumb Book Review Policy
opinion
Mar 23, 2010 2:54 PM CDT

Amazon, Change Your Dumb Book Review Policy

Let only people who have bought the books write about them

(Newser) - Michael Lewis has written an acclaimed best-seller about the financial industry, but you wouldn't know it from the customer reviews on Amazon.com. Lewis' The Big Short is getting savaged there with low ratings—by people who haven't even read it. Why? They're Kindle fans angry it isn't being made...

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' Doesn't Actually Suck

Lincoln-vampire mashup offers lively metaphor for slavery

(Newser) - Writer Seth Grahame-Smith landed a six-figure deal for a book called Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Does it suck? Surprisingly, no, says Time 's Lev Grossman. This mashup of history and horror may lack "richness and subtlety," but does not want for color. Grahame-Smith's writing is "lively" and...

Michael Pollan's Latest Is Best Nutrition Book in 40 Years

Food Rules deserves raves: Jane Brody

(Newser) - Out for just over a month, Michael Pollan's Food Rules is the No. 1 book on Amazon—and the best nutrition book of Jane E. Brody's career. "In the more than four decades that I have been reading and writing about the findings of nutritional science," the New ...

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