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Book Reviews

The latest indie book reviews from Self-Publishing Review

Review: The Digitally Divided Self by Ivo Quartiroli

This book begins with blurbs from some very heavy hitters, and some of my favorite writers, on the subject of new media – writers like Douglas Rushkoff and Erik Davis.  Erik Davis, in particular, writes on the more-esoteric take on the rise of technology, in books like Techgnosis.  It could help to have some familiarity with esoteric spirituality before approaching this book.  It would also help to keep a very open mind. The basic premise is that by having our heads lodged in the materialist world of the web and the tech we use to navigate the web, we […]

2014-06-19T18:03:58+02:00December 23rd, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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Review: Dancing with Duality by Stella Vance

Once in a while you stumble across a person who’s actually lived the life some have fantasized about but never had the courage to pursue. Stella Vance is one of those. She’s lived and worked in several countries all over the globe, enjoyed searching through myriad philosophies and religions of life, and experienced love in a number of satisfying, if not all permanent, relationships.

In Dancing With Duality: Confessions of a Free Spirit, Vance tells the story of her life decade by decade, but not from a lofty vantage point, glossing over the darker elements. Neither does she write […]

2011-12-23T13:53:46+02:00December 21st, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , , |
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Review: Patient Zero by Jim Beck

Just when I thought that the zombie subgenre had reached a saturation point, Jim Beck comes along with Patient Zero and proves that a clever idea can take an old idea and provide fresh flesh for hungry readers.

No pun intended.

Beck spins a simple story that is veined with strands of Frankenstein and moments of tenderness and melancholy. Bob Forrester is a man with a problem—a brain tumor. The recipient of an experimental procedure, he finds himself facing a second chance at life. Within just a short time, however, that new life becomes a mixed blessing, with side effects […]

2019-01-21T09:38:59+02:00December 13th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: , , |
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Review: The Wicked Wives by Gus Pelagatti

A true story from Philadelphia in 1938 that puzzled the police.

Lovers, drugs, gangs, the mafia, secret meetings, big insurance policies, dead husbands….that is what the Wicked Wives were made of.

These wives had many things in common and one of them was planning how to murder their husbands and not get caught so they could collect the insurance money. All this resulted in one dead husband after another, and the doctor listed the deaths from a rampant bout of pneumonia occurring in the city of Philadelphia. The wicked wives were not alone in the planning, though. The mastermind of […]

2011-12-12T14:52:26+02:00December 12th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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Review: When Truth Awakens by Terrence Carling

Wil Medlo was laid off from his job in the CIA as an analyst and now resides in Canada. He is intentionally drawn into a set of events that brings him to Chas Newbury; US “Retired” Intelligence Officer. Chas has a pharmaceutical business and a secret that he wants to exploit. But the whole affair circles around Dr. Alex Dargill, a physician specializing in tuberculosis treatment. The good Doctor was a prisoner of war during WWII of the Japanese and he worked in a prison camp on bio-warfare research. Does Dr. Dargill have some inside information about what went on […]

2014-06-19T18:05:28+02:00December 9th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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Review: Off the Grid by Dan Kolbet

It’s frightening to ponder how much we rely on the electricity delivered into our homes. Light, heat, cooking, cleaning – even the most basic elements of what we’ve come to take for granted as civilized life depend on it. It’s fair to say that if the lights suddenly went off we’d have a hard time adapting to a world of steam engines and hand cranks, whatever our lingering pastoral fantasies of what a post-apocalypse world might look like.

Dan Kolbet’s dystopian techno thriller Off the Grid offers us a picture of how a world without easy access to electricity might […]

2011-11-29T17:18:52+02:00November 29th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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Review: Unexpected Destiny by Ariana N. Dickey

First impressions are vital with self-published books, especially first novels with few user reviews. Unexpected Destiny has a fairly bland cover, rendered unfortunately dark and murky by Lulu’s printing process on the copy I received. The interior layout is mostly professional-looking, with a few odd formatting choices (most notably in the way non-human dialogue is set, which is not only strange, but inconsistent). Typos are mercifully few, and though I did notice a slight increase the farther I got into the book, I’ve seen much worse in mass-market paperbacks from top publishers.

But I don’t expect you really care that […]

2014-06-19T18:07:38+02:00November 23rd, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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Review: Honor and Entropy by Arthur Spevak

Honor and Entropy is a complex book — part mystery, part war narrative, and in essence a coming of age story, with age not measured by chronology.  Before it is these things it is also a story within a story, that of Telly Benson’s search for his long-lost father and his friend Art Spevak’s reflection on that quest and its results.

The book initially moves quickly between the Pacific Theater in World War and various U.S. time periods, people, and places.  While it was at times difficult to discern which character was thinking or speaking, the author and his readers […]

2014-06-19T18:09:02+02:00November 15th, 2011|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: |
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