Describing his life at the beginning of “Layover,” Joshua Fields says, “I didn’t connect with people I passed on my travels. We transacted things. Business. Commerce. Money.”
Kim Jong-un, the third-generation hereditary ruler of North Korea, by all measures presides over perhaps the most wretched country in the world.
Around about page 250 of Marcy Dermansky's "Very Nice," the reader begins to wonder about how this is all going to end.
This is an informative and dramatic account of the Irgun ("National Military Organization"), a leading dissident Jewish terrorist organization of the pre-1948 Israeli State. From the time of its formation in 1931 and its disbandment in September 1948 (several months after the declaration of Israeli independence in May of that year), the Irgun played an important role in the armed resistance to the British Mandatory Authority in Palestine, as well as in mounting retaliatory attacks against the hostile Palestinian Arab militias.
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican, heard his country's call to service in a law school classroom on the morning of 9/11. In that moment, "I knew the life I had anticipated in the law was over. I wanted to serve our country in uniform on the front lines."
Having interviewed a good number of police officers over the years and having accompanied patrol officers and detectives out on the streets, I've heard a good number of absorbing, amusing and atrocious cop stories.
In 1938, during one of his first meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt, Gen. George Marshall listened to plans to counter Hitler's military build-up by amassing an air force of 10,000 planes immediately, followed by 20,000 annually.
One of the hardest things for a novelist to do is to make small things seem big, big in the sense of portentous. In this, her second highly-praised novel, Ms. Rooney does that with deceptive ease; although the author has given but a hint, the reader knows something of great importance will happen down the road -- and the reader is right.
Tony Horwitz could switch times slicker than a country singer handing off the melody to the girl on the dulcimer. Whether channeling Capt. Cook in the South Seas or bedding down on frozen ground with a company of Confederate re-enactors, his sublime narratives about old times illuminated our own. Part of his genius and appeal -- a binocular focus revealing the present through the lens of the past and vice versa.
From the reviewers of the Washington Times books section, here are fourteen titles to add to your summer reading list:
Over the years, I've known a lot of combat correspondents. Their nationalities differed widely, but they shared certain things in common, tending to be skeptical, adventurous, wryly humorous and gutsy. They'd seen a lot and suffered a lot. But, for the most part, they still loved life and lived it to the hilt; they could recount their adventures with zest, but were never braggarts.
Thousands of tourists flock to Philadelphia for the historic sites and other attractions, and many of them venture to the Philadelphia Art Museum's steps, where actor Sylvester Stone ran up them famously as the fictional boxer in the 1976 film "Rocky."
