Author Archives: John Sloan

Doerr, Anthony. Four Seasons in Rome. Scribner (Simon & Schuster) New York 2007. Memoir; 2/26. I enjoyed Doerr’s Pulitzer-winner All the Light We Cannot See and I was interested in this memoir because of having taken my family to Western … Continue reading →

Koenig, John. Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster New York 2021. ??;2/26 There are quite a few surprising things about this strange book. For sure an ordinary dictionary it isn’t – not alphabetical, not putatively exhaustive. My first surprise … Continue reading →

Shaw, Martin. Liturgies of the Wild. Sentinel (Penguin Random House), 2026. NF; 2/26. It’s rare that I start a book and don’t finish it, and even rarer that I review a book I haven’t finished. Like never. But that’s what … Continue reading →

Furst, Alan. Night Soldiers. Random House, New York 1988. F;12/25. I’ve said I have a bits-and-pieces acquaintance with history: one university course (Canadian history), any familiarity mostly from TV, spotty reading here and there. So with a historical novel like … Continue reading →

McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. Simon and Schuster New York 1985. F;12/25. This is a long and widely-admired tale of American cowboys in the late 1870s. But I’d say it would be a mistake to dismiss it as a standard “western”. … Continue reading →

Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Chapman and Hall, London 1945. 12/25; F. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. (DH Lawrence) Daniel Handler disagrees. He tells … Continue reading →

Bregman, Rutger. Humankind: A Hopeful History. Original Dutch 2019, English Translation Little, Brown Boston 2021. NF; 12/25. Both a good friend and a random Instagram post recommended this and so reaching around as usual for something interesting I read it. … Continue reading →

December 2025 I had no idea when we booked the week of our anniversary at the Mexico hotel by the same name as this restaurant that we were diving into a worldwide empire. Nobu Matsuhisha is a 76-year-old Japanese chef … Continue reading →

December 2025 This is one of several restaurants in Nobu Los Cabos, a high-end resort on the Mexican Baja California peninsula. We are here for a week and haven’t yet had dinner at the main restaurant Nobu. It’s not clear … Continue reading →

Chekhov, Anton. The Complete Short Novels. circa1886-1902. Translation and collected by R Pevear and L Volokhonsky. Vintage, New York, 2005. F;10/25. From time to time I run across a famous writer (or in nonfiction some important people or events in … Continue reading →