Robin Taylor

I contributed a number of book reviews to the general-interest publication BookPage.

by Jon Katz
February 2000
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/0002bp/nonfiction/geeks.html
Of course Jon Katz plugs his own book on Amazon.com’s Web site. After all, Geeks is about the way the Internet is changing people’s lives. It’s about people making connections, especially the kind of people—the “lost” people—who have trouble connecting in the real world. He says tongue-in-cheek that he wrote [...]

by Douglas Coupland
January 2000
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/0001bp/fiction/miss_wyoming.html
Meet the older, wiser Douglas Coupland. His latest novel, Miss Wyoming, loses the flaws that mar his weaker novels—too much style, not enough substance; pseudo-profound ramblings; and self-absorbed, unsympathetic characters. Instead, Miss Wyoming is composed in Coupland’s best writing—witty, irreverent, and full of detailed characterizations and up-to-the-minute pop culture.
Coupland’s characters [...]

by Betty Fussell
October 1999
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9910bp/nonfiction/my_kitchen_wars.html
A good memoir can be written about a series of interesting events, but the best memoirs have a unifying theme. Betty Fussell, food writer and food history expert, has written a unique memoir about her life in food and war. Reading My Kitchen Wars is as enjoyable as watching a [...]

by Claire Messud
September 1999
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9909bp/fiction/last_life.html
“I am American now,” Sagesse LaBasse declares at the opening of Claire Messud’s second novel, The Last Life. Readers will be thankful that she doesn’t tell her story American-style. In contrast to a nation full of people who compete to tell their most shocking secrets in front of a studio [...]

by Loida Maritza Perez
March 1999
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9903bp/fiction/geographies_of_home.html
You might expect Dominican-American Loida Maritza Perez’s remarkable first novel to brim with warm, hazy memories of the homeland (and be cut with the immigrant’s shock of immersion in a new culture). That’s why the intimate scale of Geographies of Home comes as such a surprise: the action happens [...]

by Leonard Shlain
Reviewed October 1998
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9810bp/nonfiction/alphabet_vs_goddess.html
You may know a little about your brain’s hemispheres. Maybe you’ve heard that a “right-brained” person is more creative, and a “left-brained” person is good at math. Or is it the other way around?
Leonard Shlain, a surgeon, can tell you about right brain and left brain functions—and more. In [...]

by Robert Hellenga
July 1998
BookPage URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9807bp/fiction/fall_of_a_sparrow.html
Readers familiar with Robert Hellenga’s first novel, The Sixteen Pleasures, will hear its echoes in his second, ruminative book, The Fall of a Sparrow. Hellenga again explores the subtle details of the creation and preservation of beauty, this time through the crafts of American blues guitar, traditional Italian cooking, and [...]