Book Reviews

Below, a review of Samuel Babbitt’s Limited Engagement, a self-published history of the short but glorious life of Kirkland College, of which Babbitt was the founding and only president. Limited Engagement shows how self-publishing makes it possible to create great books that have a fundamentally limited audience. This review was originally posted on my site Wetmachine, part of a my very occasional series of reviews of self-published books.

One night in the late spring of 1978, two young women broke into the registrar’s office at Hamilton College. Their mission was simple: to remove their academic records, along […]

Review by Joel Friedlander, TheBookDesigner.com

Our next book for review is a book of short stories, Stories from the Asphalt by John Sparger 5.5″ x 8.5″ 208 pages, softbound, ISBN 978-0979865008, Publisher: Unabashed Media, 2008.

In his email, John informed me that the book was printed by Lightning Source. The cover artwork is by Baron von Lind, the cover design by Erich Russek, and the interior artwork by Aaron Allen. John designed and produced the interior using Adobe InDesign.

Here’s what he has to say about Stories from the Asphalt:

Through an interconnected collage of short stories, flash fiction,

The structure of this novel might make a writer sit up and say, “Why didn’t I think of this?”  The book follows Tuesday Morning (her real name) throughout her life in a series of diary entries and real life events.  The book will switch from 2009 to 1990 to 1998 and back again.  It’s a great way to illustrate the timelessness of life – how old events are with us, almost as if they’re always happening in real time.  Tuesday decides to reimagine her diary as a way of reimagining her life – as if she can rewrite her real […]

The apocalypse no doubt is a huge subject right now in movies and literature, but for the most part apocalypse narratives are the result of war, environmental catastrophe, or disease. American Apocalypse takes a different, and unique, approach – the financial crisis, where the crisis turns into all-out catastrophe.

The novel is similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in the sense that there is no detailed explanation about how the crisis occurred – it is centered mostly around how people survive the crisis. One of the haunting things about The Road is not understanding just why the apocalypse has […]

Review by Joel Friedlander, TheBookDesigner.com

Our next book for review is the historical novel The Fiddler’s Gun by A.S. Peterson. (6″ x 9″, 293 pages, softbound, ISBN 978-0615325422, Rabbit Room Press.)

Design Review—Cover

This novel is set during the American revolutionary war. Arthur Peterson said in his email to me that

I have not been impressed with the quality of POD printing and decided to go with offset in part because the design of the book cried out for rough-edged (deckled) pages and a matte laminate cover.

The cover for Fiddler’s Gun shows the amount of work Arthur has put […]

Review by Joel Friedlander, TheBookDesigner.com

Our next book for review is Jillian’s Gold by Levi Montgomery. (5.5″ x 8.5″, 422 pages, ISBN 978-1448635535, CreateSpace.) Levi tells me in his email that “I have written and designed six books in just under three years, resulting in a rather steep learning curve, the top of which I haven’t found yet!” He actually sent me material for an earlier book as well. Because Levi has been refining his designs I decided to only review this, his latest, as a good representation of where he is on his learning curve at present.

Design Review—Cover

Before getting to this review I should add a short disclaimer. Darryl Sloan and I are e-friends (never met him, he’s in the U.K., I’m in the U.S.) and we’ve traded books in the past. This didn’t factor into this review, but it should be mentioned. Secondly, I come to this book about esoteric spirituality with a particularly esoteric worldview of my own. See this interview between me and and an atheist to read where I’m coming from.  It’s important going in because I’m predisposed to many of the ideas put forth in Reality Check.

That said, what makes […]