Review: The Crossroads
If you know a young reader who’s been interested in exploring ghost stories and tales with a spooky bite, I’ve got the perfect book for you. Chris Grabenstein’s The Crossroads is an excellent entry vehicle for these young readers, especially reluctant ones who get bored reading.
Book Review: ‘The Woman Behind Little Women’ 
Although Louisa May Alcott is best-known for her beloved novel Little Women, Harriet Reisen’s biography Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women reminds us how vast Alcott’s body of work is and offers a sometimes-surprising portrait of the author. Who knew that Alcott wrote “erotic” stories to pay the bills or that she was at one time a successful stage actress?
Review: THOR, Volume 1
J. Michael Straczynski has won me over with his new Thor series. Not only did he find an extremely cool way to reintroduce the character to the Marvel Comics universe, but set Asgard in Oklahoma, my home state. How freaking cool is that?
Review: Diving Into The Wreck
Looking at the cover, I expected Diving into the Wreck to be a rollicking space opera novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Instead, the novel (actually a collection of three blended novellas) is a solid science fiction read that examines the consequences of dangerous technology as well as the very real danger of diving wrecks in space.
Young bankers save the world in Zuckerman’s ‘Fortunes of War’
In the early 30s a group of idealist young men and women, six in all, join forces at the University of Berkeley to hypothesize a new economic theory they call the Power Cycle. It is their idea that leading world industrialists are shaping social events and becoming the true powers behind international governments, including Germany. The six, all heirs to wealthy banking families, decide to become an economic watch group and call themselves the Sentinels.
Stirling’s ‘The Sky People’ a tribute to the Golden Age of Science Fiction
S. M. Stirling came up with the idea of an alternate history series showcasing intelligent life on Venus and Mars, and wrote two books about those planets. He delivers old school adventure in The Sky People, and I had a blast reading about Ranger Lt. Marc Vitrac, a Cajun-born and bred soldier turned interplanetary security guard and explorer.
Baca’s ‘A Glass of Water’ the work of blistering passion
It was in prison, where he served six and a half years in his twenties, a portion of that on death row, that Baca began his literary career, trading poems to fellow inmates for cigarettes.
Book review: ‘The First Way of War’
John Grenier is one of those historians working to correct the record, and his The First Way of War begins, appropriately enough for any overview of American military history, with the wars waged by the first English colonies in North America in 1607, and runs all the way through the Creek War of 1813-1814.
