Review of Book Reviews in 2007 by RayS

Directions: The date at the beginning of each book is the date on which my review was published in this blog. Each review consists of three parts: 1. “Why read it?” 2. Sample ideas from the book, either paraphrased or quoted, and 3. Final, thought-provoking quotes. To locate the review, look at the “Blog Archive” at the right of the blog. Click on the year 2007. Find the month in which the review was published, click on it and go to the date of the review.

Monday, April 23, 2007. A Country Doctor. Sarah Orne Jewett. Novel. Nan decides to become a doctor instead of marrying, for which she is severely criticized by friends and relatives. In Jewett’s day, she could not do both.

Thursday, April 26, 2007. The Country of the Pointed Firs. Sarah Orne Jewett. Novel. Stories of the people of the rural seacoast of Maine, whose lives are both rich and lonely. After reading this novel, I learned why rural people just “drop in” unannounced.

Friday, April 27, 2007. Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi. Howard Gardner. Distinguishes between creative thinking which is diverse and convergent thinking that looks only for right answers.

Saturday, April 28, 2007. Criticism: The Major Texts. Walter Jackson Bate, ed. This book is a textbook that contains the original statements on literary and artistic criticism from Plato to Edmund Wilson.

Sunday, April 29, 2007. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Pope John Paul II. The Pope confronts the most persistent questions about religion. Example: Why does God permit suffering?

Monday, April 30, 2007. The Da Vinci Code: A Novel. Dan Brown. Novel. Contains all the ingredients of a best-seller.

Tuesday, May 1, 2007. Day One: Before Hiroshima and After. Peter Wyden. Vivid account of the problems in communication that occurred on America's way to developing the atomic bomb. Vivid retelling of the sufferings of the Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Balanced account of the reasons for dropping the atomic bomb—the fanatical defense of the homeland by the Japanese military.

Wednesday, May 2, 2007. Decline and Fall. Evelyn Waugh. Novel. A wacky novel with wacky characters. Send-up of public schools and prisons in England.

Thursday, May 3, 2007. Deephaven. Sarah Orne Jewett. Novel. Two young women spend an idyllic summer vacation in Deephaven, once a thriving Maine seaport town. Will remind readers of their own idyllic summer vacations.

Friday, May 4, 2007. The Devil in Massachusetts. Marion L. Starkey. Young girls set off hysteria by charging that they had been hurt by witches. The result was both chaos and crisis, the Salem witch trials—and executions. A study of irrational behavior in society.