Category: Mark Reviews Books
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Unwanted, by Linda Smith: Book Review
Unwanted by Linda Smith is a profound real life page turner! It describes an initially reluctant mother’s battle to champion the existence of her disabled son. Put yourself in her shoes What if your child was born, and the doctor grimly pronounced the baby “mongoloid?” Then declared it profoundly disabled with Down Syndrome and mental…
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Mark’s Review of Thomas Wolfe’s Kingdom Of Speech
My rating: 3 of 5 stars. Sorry. Eloquently argued, though tendentious to the point of screed. Thomas Wolfe eviscerates the theories of Charles Darwin (evolution based on natural selection) and Noam Chomsky (linguistics as an innate language acquisition device that produces a universal grammar). An Informative Lecture I love how it started out, though. As…
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Reading Richard Ford’s “The Lay Of The Land”
I am now about 110 pages into the second novel of Richard Ford’s Bascombe trilogy. So far it reflects the author’s penchant for reflective writing and the search for meaning in the banality of daily living. It is challenging to find Bascombe a truly sympathetic character at this point. Sure he’s insightful. He spews more…
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Brief Review of Superb Novel The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini My rating: 5 of 5 stars A beautifully written, evocative novel of growing up in a society riven by war, betrayals and efforts toward redemption. Afghanistan in the mid 1970’s serves as the early backdrop as two young friends, star-crossed by class yet inseparable, fly their kites with an…
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Book Review: “The Hypnotist” by Sarah Sheard
The Hypnotist is the first book I read by Toronto psychotherapist and author Sarah Sheard. It was back in 2001, at a time when I was contemplating becoming a novelist who, like Sheard, would draw upon their professional experience to inform a book’s plot and themes. I ended up focusing on my nonficton writing instead, until recently. A Novel…