Ben East Books

Category: Book Reviews

  • What is the WOT

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    Ben East
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    Three novelists offer their views of Two Pumps for the Body Man, a satire about life on the front line of the War on Terror. …the pace is fast… Two Pumps is a page-turner, baby, and it takes some real balls to satirize the great Christian crusade of our times. …a wry ode to the cluster-f*** of…

  • Broadcasting the Poetry of Horror

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    Ben East
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    Review–Gateways to Abomination A parade of horrors files past in Matthew Bartlett’s Gateways to Abomination, accompanied by the strains of an otherworldly broadcast. The discord awakens both terror and fascination, makes our eyes pop even as we struggle to look away. The writing—poetic, detailed, traumatizing—gives lift to hairs we didn’t know we had at the back of…

  • Review: The Brothers Connolly

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    Ben East
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    Ted Prokash employs a rich, poetic voice to tell his story of middle America, giving The Brothers Connolly the quality of an epic. His narrator breaks this novel free of its small-town confines. The writing, here, is the main event. Prokash is skillful and convincing in his portrayal of life in Napawaupee, Wisconsin. He renders with equal…

  • Foreign Service Writers

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    Ben East
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    The March issue of the Foreign Service Journal covers the annual book fair and includes a call for FS-affiliated writers to submit news of forthcoming and recently published books for the November round up. Authors are also invited to submit work for review on this blog: I recently reviewed retired FSO James F. O’Callaghan’s No Circuses. See below. From the FSJ…

  • “Blog Thing”

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    Ben East
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    Two years ago I published my first book review. It was for a work of non-fiction by Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Bryant Wieneke. A returned volunteer myself, I did the review to satisfy a couple of urges. First, it was a service to a comrade, albeit one I’d never met. But we had the same fire…

  • Infidelities for Valentine’s Day

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    Ben East
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    It’s just like Michael Hemmingson to be gone. Just when I wanted to thank him for his black Valentine’s Day messages. There’s a world of hurt in his collection Pictures of Houses with Water Damage (Black Lawrence Press, 2010). It’s a numbed kind of hurt, the kind of pain felt after a breakup, whether you wanted to…

  • Review: Foreign Service Fiction

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    Ben East
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    Anyone who thinks diplomacy is about choosing the right fork at the right time should think again and read James O’Callaghan’s clever satire No Circuses (Tacchino Press, 2015). Forget preconceived notions of dinner-party diplomacy: keeping one’s elbows off the table, tangoing the rival into submission, and writing it up the next day in communiqués to DC. What diplomacy’s really about, in O’Callaghan’s world,…

  • True Crime Review: Ivory Tower Cop

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    Ben East
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    George Kirkham and Leonard Territo pair up to deliver an informative, fast-paced police procedural in Ivory Tower Cop, exploring a serial rape case based on actual events. The thriller digs into half a dozen savage crimes, the latest developments in forensic science, arcane Biblical studies, historical detail from The Third Reich, and Nazism’s reach into…

  • Reviewers’ resource

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    Ben East
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    If you’re looking to sink your teeth into reviewing books, Atticus Review is a good place to start. You can hear from their book review editor, Sam Slaughter, at Citizen Lit. He offers up a few thoughts on the art of the review and his approach to guiding writers in the process. Listen to the whole thing…

  • Cheney: still wrong after all these years

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    Ben East
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    Former veep, elegantly cloaked in fiction Crediting Dick Cheney for his rebuke of Donald Trump’s bigotry gets no traction with me. Sorry Dick: you can’t make up for decades of reckless decisions and bad policy based on one easy moment of obvious decency. You’re still a modern architect of the very party now on the verge of nominating a racist…