Summary: Michael Oher is a hulking mass of a teenager who is essentially homeless due to his mother’s drug addictions. Michael has been staying with friend Steve Hamilton and his family, but that situation is precarious. Steve’s father “Big Tony” does what he can to help Michael, which includes talking the football coach at [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Dombey and Son is the name of a powerful shipping house in London. The owner of the house is Paul Dombey, who, at the beginning of the story is elated because his wife has just given birth to a son, thus fulfilling the name of the house. To be sure, [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): Claireece “Precious” Jones is a functionally illiterate 16-year-old girl who is still in junior high school. Though not a good student, Precious finds school to be a refuge of sorts, as whatever she goes through there feels like paradise compared to the physical, verbal, and sexual abuse doled out by [...]
Summary: Sarah Palin is one of the most recognizable figures in American politics today. Plucked from relative obscurity on August 29, 2008 when Senator John McCain chose her as his running mate, there was an immediate media frenzy surrounding Palin. This frenzy lasted for the remaining two months of the election, and has continued [...]
Summary: A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity is a memoir by news commentator Bill O’Reilly that strives to give people insight into how he became the man he is today. To do that, he tells many stories of his childhood and how those incidents, as well as the people involved in them, helped shape [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an epistolary novel that takes place in 1946, shortly after the conclusion of World War II. Thirty-something Juliet Ashton is a promising author whose first book was a minor success, and who is now being pressured by publisher (and good friend) [...]
Book summary: Conservative columnist Ann Coulter takes on liberal politicians once again in her 2007 bestseller If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans. This book is a collection of some of Coulter’s best quotes from articles and interviews that she’s given during the course of her career. She samples heavily from previous books [...]
Book Summary: East to the Dawn by Susan Butler is a comprehensive biography of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an aircraft. As with most biographies, this book is laid out in chronological order, giving readers a detailed account of Amelia’s life from her earliest childhood in Kansas to her [...]
Plot summary (with spoilers): The Arrival is a graphic novel that wordlessly tells the story of an unnamed man’s immigration to a new country. The drawings lay out the man’s plight, first by showing that his family lives in less than luxurious circumstances, with not a single piece of modern furniture or decent crockery [...]
Summary: Columbine by Dave Cullen was released to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of one of the worst school shootings in American history. On April 20, 1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, smuggled bombs and guns into their school. By the time their shooting spree [...]