Tostada Speaks Book Blog

Irish tales by a master storyteller from Northern Ireland

2012-01-28T16:40:00.001+09:00

If you’ve never been to Ireland or Northern Ireland, once you read these 12 tales by Northern Irish writer Gerry McCullough, you will want to go. In fact, you will likely want to go to Donegal, find a pub and wait for a seanachie (Irish storyteller) to begin spinning his tales. “Whenever I can,” the narrator begins, “I like to spend a week, or even a long weekend, i Ardnakil, the small

A powerful new book about the tsunami disaster in Japan in March, 2011

2012-01-26T18:47:00.000+09:00

Keiko Takahashi: Beyond the Vast Wasteland: 24 Poems and Photographs of life after the Great Earthquake of East Japan. Tokyo, Sampoh Publishing Co;, Ltd, 2011. English translation by William L. Brooks, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University. Photographs by Kei Ogata and Hidesato Iwamura. My wife and I became aware that something big was happening on March 11, 2011 when tremors

One of the most tragic fairy tales in modern fiction

2012-01-22T12:51:00.000+09:00

Kathleen McKenna is a writer who grabs me with the first paragraph and won’t let me go until I’ve finished her tale. And this tale was, for me, very difficult to read. A sad, tragic story of a young woman who is born into unbelievable riches, was “the apple of her father’s eye” in the same way his football team was: As long as she is presentable and didn’t embarrass the family name, she

Two must have books on sexual abuse and recovery

2012-01-17T06:22:00.001+09:00

Two remarkable books by a very remarkable woman named Stacey Danson. I recommend these without qualification to anyone who has been sexually abused, know anyone who has, works with sexually abused children, street kids or people who used to live on the streets as kids. Stacey Danson is, to put it quite simply, a very remarkable woman. A victim of horrible sexual abuse at the hands

A heartfelt, compassionate memoir by a champion overcomer

2012-01-17T05:19:00.000+09:00

From age five until age eleven, when she beat up her mother and ran away and lived on the streets of Sydney, Australia for five years, Stacy Danson endured the most grotesque kind of child abuse at the hands of her mother there is. That story was told in her remarkable book Empty Chairs. Faint Echoes of Laughter tells the rest of the story. Heartfelt, tough and compassionate like she is, it

A book and a series that's sure to win a following

2012-01-07T15:42:00.001+09:00

John Booth’s “House of Silver Magic”, is sure to become a favorite of readers who love stories about ghosts and sinister neighbors. In this gem of a book, a recently widowed mother and her three teenage children are kicked out of their house in a fraudulent auction. Soon after they learn that a man named Ezekiel has left them a large old house that is completely furnished, has some resident

A must read for anyone whose child is diagnosed with cancer

2012-01-07T14:37:00.000+09:00

When your healthy, active child is diagnosed with cancer, what’s your first reaction? If you’re like most most people, you panic. That was Sheila Taylor’s first reaction when her bright, athletic, dreams-of-being-a-pilot youngest son saw a doctor for a nagging pain in his knee and was diagnosed with osteosarcoma. He could lose his leg and he could die. What would happen to his dream of

A chiller of a thriller that Alfred Hitchcock would love.

2012-01-01T08:43:00.000+09:00

“Obsession”, by British writer Nigel Lampard, is an intense psychological thriller that would make an absolutely chilling movie. One day happily married Matthew Ryan returns from a business trip to the brain-numbing news that his wife, Emily, doesn’t. love him any more, wants a divorce, is pregnant, the baby isn’t his (she’s been seeing someone else), and she wants him to leave. Stunned, he

An honest cop with an attitude, a young woman in trouble, the mob, the feds, a dash of romance -- a winner!

2011-12-27T08:03:00.000+09:00

I enjoy a good detective novel, and B. A. Morton’s “Mrs. Jones” is a gem. Detective Connell is an honest cop with an attitude about authority, a smart mouth and Irish charm. Lizzie, aka Mrs. Jones is a young British woman in New York City on a mission she doesn’t understand who witnesses a hit-and-run her first day in town. When she and Connell connect with each other and the bad guys, a

The Jenin invasion, as the survivors experienced it.

2011-12-24T07:32:00.000+09:00

If human rights and justice are important to you, then put “Searching Jenin” on your reading list and study it. I remember the news reports on Israel’s attack on the Jenin refugee camp. It was brutal, it was thorough, and it was presented as justified. Oddly, the experience of the camp’s residents was missing. Here they are not; they form the core of the book, and, as one might expect, they

Life, love, ghosts, wood spirits and demons in MIchigan’s Upper Peninsula.

2011-12-23T06:15:00.004+09:00

When I opened P. D. Allen’s Tales of the Yoopernatural and began reading, I didn’t know who P. D. Allen was or what to expect from him. A few pages later, I was thoroughly fascinated and couldn’t put the book down. I didn’t know what “yoopernatural” was, or who the “Yoopers” were either. In case you don’t, they’re the residents of Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula (the UP), and these

Israel's experiments in human despair

2011-12-18T08:51:00.000+09:00

British journalist Jonathan Cook knows his subject intimately. The only Western journalist based in Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel and married to a Palestinian woman, he experiences Israel’s experiments in human despair on a daily basis. The experience is not a pleasant one, and “Disappearing Palestine” is not an easy book to read. In fact, I found the experience

Move over, John Rebus, you’ve got company

2011-12-18T07:30:00.000+09:00

I like reading police procedural novels, and Alfie Robins’s Reprisal is the best police procedural novel I’ve read in a long time. There is a vicious serial killer making the rounds of northern England’s Kingston-on-Hull (known locally simply as Hull), and Detective Chief Inspector Philip Marlowe and his team have to find him fast. Never mind that the victims are drug addicts, this killer,

An enjoyable tale of love and loss

2011-12-12T09:40:00.001+09:00

A young war widow still grieving the loss of her husband sits alone in her house when a mammoth winter storm. The power flickers, then goes out. There is a tremendous crash. A massive tree has come crashing through the roof of her sunroom. What is she going to do? Then there is a knock on the door. Should she open it, or ignore it? Fearfully, she opens it, as it could be help. Standing

A very good trio of short stories by Tom Winton

2011-12-07T07:36:00.001+09:00

I like reading short stories, and this trio from best-selling writer Tom Winton are some of the best. Of the trio -- "Movin' On", "The Voice of Willie Morgan" and "Squandered Prayers" -- my personal favorite is "The Voice of Willie Morgan". All three are about family -- troubled families, to be exact -- where tempers flare and alcohol flows (never a good combination; rather like trying to put

Murder, village intrigue, pedophilia -- WHO is the villain?

2011-12-03T07:25:00.001+09:00

“Little Fingers” is a truly remarkable novel. Opening as the main character Julia Blackburn is being interviewed by police Inspector John Frampton. “There is a serial killer out there. He is living in that brain of yours as an unrecognised memory, a shadowy computation, and he must be stopped.” Inspector Frampton is a doggedly patient man who must get at the truth and stop the killings

Romance, sex, obsession and adventure

2011-12-02T06:43:00.001+09:00

A long novel, Alexandra Sophia’s “Lover From an Icy Sea” is also a mesmerizing one. About a love affair between the stunning (and wealthy) fashion magazine editor Daneka Sorenson and photographer Kit Addison, it is much, much more than that. It is about a deeply damaged woman, obsession (“And now, he realized, he’d fallen in love, deeply in love, obsessively in love, with an illusion.”),

Living in harmony with the world and with each other

2011-11-27T07:35:00.001+09:00

A review of John Philip Newell’s A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth, and The Human Soul. Jossey-Bass, 2011. Hardback, $19.95 John Philip Newell thinks in terms of the interconnectedness of all things, from the most microscopic to the cosmic. There is nothing and no one that is unimportant. As Scottish poet Kenneth White so beautifully puts it, “My thanks for this handful of April

If you're a novice writer, presenter or speaker, this is a must-have book for you.

2011-11-17T07:38:00.001+09:00

Review of Aneeta Sundararaj, “How To Tell a Great Story” Published by Bookshaker, July 2, 2011. 170 pages and Kindle Whatever it is that you do, if you want to get your point across, tell a story. The reason is simple: stories connect, they anchor ideas and images and information in our minds like nothing else does. That is what makes a great novel, a great speech, an excellent business

A memorable family saga of the 5 sons of Charlie Gisby

2011-11-11T06:35:00.001+09:00

What’s in a Name? Brendan Gisby asks in the title of the Foreword to this interesting history family sage. “What’s in a name?” is a question that millions of people ask every day, often chasing down the origin of their own family name. It’s a question that intrigued one of my own ancestors, Benjamin Kendall Emerson, that he traced the history of his own family from the time they first

"The Wandering Who? -- A Study of Jewish Identity Politics

2011-11-07T06:53:00.000+09:00

Gilad Atzmon’s transformation from a typical Jewish Israeli kid to someone who began questioning the Israeli narrative began when he heard Charlie (“Bird”) Parker with Strings on a late night jazz program. “I was totally knocked down. The music was more organic, poetic, sentimental and wilder than anything I had ever heard before.” Parker was the beginning of Atzmon’s journey away from

A beautiful, profound book of poetry by one of the best

2011-11-03T11:19:00.000+09:00

“Poetry slows us down, cherishes small details. A large disaster erases those details. We need poetry for nourishment and for noticing, for the way language and imagery reach comfortable into experience, holding and connecting it more successfully than any news channel we could name.” About her “Palestinian grandmother who lived till she was 106” she has this to say: “She wanted people

Stories and poems about Northern Ireland by a master storyteller and poet

2011-11-02T08:34:00.000+09:00

“Haunting Tales and Living Verse of Ulaid: Ghosts across our landscape”, by Colin T. Mercer. Night Publishing, October 2011. Kindle and paperback Colin Mercer’s collection of poems and stories of Northern Ireland (“Ulaid”) is an absolute gem of a book. Some of the stories are laugh-out-loud funny, others poignant, others about ghosts and body snatchers in the 1700s, Viking raids still

"Taylor Takes Charge", A delightfully comic tale of intrigue in a boy's prep school.

2011-10-10T09:26:00.000+09:00

Take a shopworn setting like Portland Court Preparatory School for Boys, an eighteen year old, newly-minted school master named Ben Glossop, a lovely young Under-Matron named Sarah Wilton, mix in a loopy band of kidnappers, a tipsy collection of senior school master’s, a Matron nicknamed “The Elephant” and a 12 year old boy named Taylor who is the real Head Master, and you have the recipe

A wonderful tale for the Christmas Season and beyond

2011-10-05T14:08:00.000+09:00

As Christmas celebrations begin, a young woman hails a taxi to take her home. On the way there is a horrible accident. Thinking that she will just be late, her parents and little sister retire for the night. Then there is a knock upon the door, which dad answers. Their beautiful, beloved daughter is no more, and the family, overwhelmed with sorrow begins to fall apart. One year later, dad is

A charming adventure set in Amazon's jungles.

2011-09-28T09:05:00.000+09:00

“Edge of Extinction” is a charmer. A story about a hidden Indian tribe in Brazil’s Amazonian jungles is interesting enough. The fact that it is led by an unusual young man named Kianda Mala (”Mala” meaning “man” in the Chachinka language), the son of an English woman and a large monkey, makes it not only a unique story, but an unusual one. In most societies, an infant with a long,

Two ebooks you won't want to miss: A tale of love and loss, and stories from a cantina

2011-09-22T16:59:00.000+09:00

Arizona writer Harvey Stanbrough's two little books are gems. Set in Mexico in tiny villages. The Cycle of Ramon tells the story of a young man named Ramon and his sweetheart Maria Elena. You know from the book's cover that this is a lament, for there it says "sometimes letting go just isn't possible." The story itself begins like this: "The world had been sad for three days. The sky wept

A delightful Romance novel that lingers

2011-09-19T06:35:00.000+09:00

If you’re looking for a delightful, romantic read that can be read in a day, this is a very clear choice. Set in England in the time of Angles, Saxons, Danes and invading Vikings, it is the story of a young Angle woman named Aelfwyn and a red-haired Dane named Ragnar, their clandestine love affair and their eventual wedding. It’s also the story of uneasy relations between Aelfwyn’s Angle

A remarkable new novel you won't be able to put down

2011-09-13T13:34:00.000+09:00

“I was reminded of where I was once I heard the soldiers making noises in the yard of the camp. Another day in Helmand. “My senses opened hesitantly yet again to the mud-ceilinged room, and my heart seemed to lose all is saddened beats ...” So begins Shah Wali Fazli’s remarkable novel about the life of an Afghan interpreter assigned to American soldiers fighting the Taliban in

"The Last American Martyr", a poignant, gripping tale that you won't be able to put down or forget

2011-09-02T19:44:00.002+09:00

If you enjoy a well-told story that sucks you in, grabs you by the heart strings and has you holding your breath and gripping the armrests of the chair you’re sitting on, The Last American Martyr gives you all of that and more as the protagonist flees across America trying to evade those who want to kill him. In one particularly hair-raising scene, he drives into a huge Texas tornado

2011-08-25T13:48:00.003+09:00

Edwin Thumboo, ed. & Words: Poems Singapore and Beyond. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2010. 264 pp. ISBN 978-981-08-6321-0. There are several ways one can read Edwin Thumboo’s poetry anthology: First, as a collection of Singaporean poetry in English; second, as poetry written in World Englishes, showing “how the shared experience of colonialism and recovery from it... generates common responses” (11)

Unforgettable stories by one of India's greatest writers

2011-08-25T13:12:00.005+09:00

Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Short Stories. Trans. Mohammad A. Quayum. New Delhi: Macmillan, 2011. liii+160 pp. ISBN 023- 033-277-3. Whereas the names of many Nobel laureates in Literature have been forgotten, Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Nobel laureate (1913), remains an important and compelling figure in world literature. Professor Quayum’s book, with its collection of nineteen of

A gripping tale of adventure and intrigue

2011-08-21T08:07:00.004+09:00

If you’re looking for a well-written novel filled with adventure, romance, intrigue and plenty of gripping, gritty action involving the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, bureaucratic turf wars, Russian spies, terrorists and submarining, this is definitely a novel you will want to read. No nonsense Lt. Commander Mollie Sanders, an exceptionally bright officer young who gets her way because she’s the most

A wonderful, well-written novel with a surprise ending that's really a surprise

2011-08-14T06:30:00.007+09:00

"Collin had the perfect life. He had a loving family and everything money could buy. A life envied by all. But Collin wasn't perfect. He had a secret, one that came with a price. A secret that could destroy his life and everyone in it." So begins K. C. Hilton's remarkable novel. Not that it starts off with a bang, because it doesn't; it starts off as a very likable family story about two loving

A good book that needs some work

2011-08-11T10:03:00.003+09:00

The story opens on 23 October 1935 as hard-boiled private eye Errol Black is tucking into a nice, bloody porterhouse steak. Then someone walks into the restaurant and begins shooting and his dinner with partners Dyke Spanner and Terry Shadow is blown all to Hell. So are Terry Shadow and the two intended victims, notorious mob boss Dutch Schulz (who lives for 23 hours) and one of his henchmen.

If you enjoy love and romance, you'll love this book by Jessica Degarmo

2011-08-06T08:04:00.004+09:00

If you enjoy stories of love and romance, you will love this book by Jessica Degarmo. When Caitlin Edison’s live-in boyfriend of ten years walked out on her because he was bored, she was devastated. If this was “love”, she wanted no more to do with it. Talking about it with her best girlfriends, one of them suggested a “sure-fire” cure she’d read about in a magazine. The cure? Go to a nice

A gripping tale of intrigue set in WWII Europe

2011-08-01T07:32:00.004+09:00

A gripping tale of intrigue. Robert Craven’s Get Lenin is the kind of novel that pulls you in the minute you pick it up and won’t let you leave until you’ve finished, it, sit back and say “Wow, what an adventure!” The title comes from a very intriguing and very mad idea: Seeking for a way to assure his place in Hitler’s inner circle, Dr. Joseph Goebbels hatches a plan so secret it is even kept

A fast-paced tale of vengeance and courage

2011-07-13T18:40:00.004+09:00

C. J. Martin has written a thriller of a story about vengeance with a long memory, a man's checkered past revealed, and his daughter's life threatened. Fast-paced and loaded with action and very believable characters including Kazuo Tanaka (if that is his real name) and his daughter, this short story is a teaser for what is sure to come: a full-length novel that, if it is anything like this story

Deconstructing the Goose and living to tell about it.

2011-07-13T06:19:00.003+09:00

In 2001, pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche was making billions from its acne medication Accutane. Over the next few years disturbing news began to surface about its possible side-effects, the chief of which was its effect on the brain, evidenced by between 300 and 3,000 young people whose only problem was acne began to experience depression, suicide and violent behavior. Psychiatrist and

As boisterous, hair-raising and funny a crime novel as you're likely to read

2011-07-10T05:59:00.004+09:00

Stories to delight your imagination, make you laugh, and beg for more

2011-01-09T07:54:00.001+09:00

I first ran across this book in a shop in Seattle, Washington back in 1993 when it was first published. Updated in 2005, it and its companions (which includes "Still Mostly True", published in 1994 and updated in 2005) have long been my favorites. The following story, "Tiger Rain", will tell you why ... it's the kind of story that sends my imagination off on fantastic adventures. “Her umbrella

An unforgettable novel that ends too soon.

2011-01-08T10:04:00.000+09:00

My wife found a reference to this novel in one of her Japanese language newspapers and suggested that I buy and read it. Am I ever happy that I did! Nina Revoyr has written a wonderful, gripping novel about some very tough times in our country, and has done so with understanding, compassion and feeling. Readers who lived through the era following World War Two will recall the ugly racial

A Controversial Thesis: War is a force that gives us meaning.

2011-01-07T09:37:00.001+09:00

Curious title, isn't it? If war is a force that gives us meaning, how does it give us meaning? The answer lies in the underlying myth that supports it, and has supported it, from the dawn of the human species. This is the Warrior Myth, and it is part of every culture and society. We see it in familiar stories of great warriors, heroes, heroines and gods, all of whom fight great battles to

Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed

2011-01-02T08:33:00.001+09:00

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } Efraim Karsh: Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010. Howard Sachar, author of A History of Israel, calls it “A work of meticulous, even exhaustive scholarship which must be taken with great seriousness and respect by historians of diverse points of view. Indeed, any student of modern Israel will ignore at their peril its sheer cornucopia of factual

See everyone in two to three weeks. Happy New Year

2010-12-30T10:19:00.000+09:00

I'll be back with some exciting new reviews once I get my computer problems solved. I'll probably be offline for the next two to three weeks until I either get my computer fixed, or get a new computer. Happy New Year from snowy Sapporo, Japan, George Polley

Hatim Kanaaneh: A Doctor in Galilee

2010-12-17T09:43:00.001+09:00

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } Hatim Kanaaneh is the kind of physician I enjoyed working with in my career as a mental health professional: compassionate, humorous and committed to bringing quality medical services to the people of his community which in his case, was in spite of incredible odds. The government agencies that ought to have helped him because their help would have contributed

A master story teller's masterful story about loss and love and mystery

2010-12-10T04:46:00.001+09:00

Garth Stein: Raven Stole the Moon, Harper, 2010. Raven Stole the Moon, Garth Stein’s first novel, first published in 1998, was released in a new edition earlier this year, and I couldn’t be happier, because I love this novel. I was immersed in it from the first sentence … no, from before the first sentence … it was the word Akákoschi! (Tlingit for “See”) that caught my eye on a page I almost

Breakthrough: Transforming Fear into Compassion in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

2010-12-06T10:33:00.001+09:00

Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion, a new perspective on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Insight Press, Albuquerque, NM, November 2010. Paperback. Richard Forer is a certified practitioner of the Meir Schneider Self-Healing Method. I met Richard Forer during a conversation he was having with a blogger about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Learning that he had just finished writing

Empire for Liberty

2010-12-03T09:37:00.001+09:00

Revised review of Richard Immerman: Empire for Liberty: A history of American imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton University Press, 2010. From the standpoint of understanding America’s recent history, Empire for Liberty is an exciting book. American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, liberty, American expansion from a collection of thirteen British colonies to the

Grandfather and the Raven and The Old Man and the Monkey for the Holiday Season

2010-11-25T06:17:00.000+09:00

The holiday season is a time of remembrance, celebration and giving thanks. What is there that you can celebrate and give thanks for? A person? A word? A wink? A smile? A tiny winter flower? Or were you at the right place and time when the sun set behind nearby mountains as a big golden moon rose over the river? Whatever it is, celebrate it and be thankful for its being there. Then give the

An enchanting tale well told

2010-11-22T15:50:00.000+09:00

Catherine Condie's tale of three young people and their time travel adventure from the rural vicar's house at Claybridge, England back in time to World War II and back again using a local potter's wheel as entry point to the past. It's all to save their house from being torn down by a greedy speculator who wants to turn the property into a housing development. But Connie and her brother Charlie

James Lee Burke and Swan Peak, a Postscript

2010-11-14T11:10:00.001+09:00

As I said in my review of Swan Peak, I like James Lee Burke's Robicheaux novels, well enough to have read sixteen of them -- I missed Pegasus Descending (2006) and haven't yet bought his newest one The Glass Rainbow (2010) -- yet at the same time, I've found them disturbing and, especially in Swan Peak downright annoying. The disturbing part has to do with the violence done against defenseless

Sam Harris and The Moral Landscape

2010-11-14T07:18:00.000+09:00

Many people, especially in the United States, will read "How science can determine human values" and recoil in horror at the word determine, especially when it is penned by someone considered an "enemy" of religion. "Only God", they will say, "determines what moral values are. Scientists should stick to science and leave moral values alone." My suggestion is that, if you are one such person, read

War is Killing People, a review of "The Bomb", by Howard Zinn

2010-11-08T08:19:00.000+09:00

Howard Zinn: The Bomb. San Francisco, Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 2010, 91 pages. $8.95 Comprised of two previously published essays on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the French village of Royan at the end of World War Two plus a new Introduction by the author. Both attacks were justified and defended as necessary in bringing the wars with Germany and Japan to an end. Yet,

A People's History of the United States

2010-11-05T10:33:00.000+09:00

Howard Zinn's book is not new, but it is new to me. First published in 1980 and most recently in 2005 as a Harper Perennial Modern Classic, it was recommended to me earlier this year by Ramzy Baroud, journalist, editor of The Palestine Chronicle and author of My Father Was a Freedom Fighter. Given our recent history, it is a book that ought to be on everyone's reading list, and taught in every

Mending the hearts of the wounded

2010-11-03T20:28:00.000+09:00

How Can You Mend This Purple Heart? by T. L. Gould. Publisher: Night Publishing (UK) in paperback and kindle editions. Available at www.amazon.com. How can you mend a purple heart? According to the men I've interviewed over the years, it isn't easy. My uncle Martin went to France in 1918 as a happy-go-lucky eighteen year old whom everyone loved and came home two years later emotionally shattered

Living inside a maelstrom haunted by ghosts

2010-11-03T04:49:00.001+09:00

James Lee Burke is one of my favorite writers. His prose is eloquent, quotable, and graphic. He views the world from the perspective of the marginalized and maimed and forgotten, some of whom struggle to escape an ugly karma and live lives that are happy and relatively tranquil. Some of them make it, some of them don't, and some of them are left with questions that are never really answered. In

An Intriguing and Very British Novel

2010-10-25T08:50:00.000+09:00