Category: Book Reviews
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New Middle Grade Fiction
Appreciated the chance to chime in on Robbie Yates latest release, The Kooky Kids’ Club, and honored to have a blurb on the cover. I found the story relatable and empathetic, the story-telling spare and true. In the author’s own words: Maxine is smart, quirky, and a bit of a misfit. One day, she receives…
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Foreign Service Writings
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My favorite Foreign Service Journal issue of the year is out! All the recently published books by writers affiliated with America’s proud diplomatic corps are listed in one tight package this month. Pick up a few titles and learn about the Foreign Service. Read about how we promote U.S. interests and protect our citizens overseas.…
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Blog of the Week
This pleasant surprise came across my desk yesterday. A blogger at The Skeptical Bureaucrat writes: I picked up some nice items at the AAFSW* book fair last week, and one of them was this quirky novel Two Pumps for the Body Man, which the author describes as a soft-boiled diplomatic noir… The story is a…
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American Tabloid*
In one quick blow The AP updates James Ellroy’s 1950’s noir as contemporary political sleaze. National Enquirer hid damaging Trump stories in a safe WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump… Tabloid…
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Always
Puzzled that I’d spend my time doing this, people will ask, ‘How long have you been writing?’ Part accusation, part sincere inquiry, it deserves consideration. The truest answer I have—and it’s not a wise guy answer—is always. I say ‘truest’ because of the stages leading up to my present output: two published novels; two mid-grade…
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Fiction Review—Napawaupee County Blues
From the start, we know what crime lands ‘Cool Hand’ Luke on the county chain gang: cutting the heads off parking meters. He’s sent up for decapitation of authority, and all that follows bears the symbolic weight of his crime. Ted Prokash gives it to us another way. Napawaupee County Blues (Expat Press, 2018) describes life…
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Posting from a New Home
After five years posting from DC, BenEastBooks moves on to Mumbai. Expect the same focus on craft and reviewing serious books by independent authors. Expect new writing invigorated by travel and adventure. Expect postings flavored with the exotic, the ancient, the extraordinary, and the very new. I welcome contributions, requests for reviews, and sensible observations. When…
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Maximum City
We are neither here nor there. The carpets are up and the curios down. The boys are packed and shipped off south for a week with Naniji. A week from tomorrow the packers arrive. They’ll invade for 3 or 4 days to box up several categories of shipment: 700 lbs of air freight; 7k lbs…
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Can He also Ride a Porcupine?
Two weeks ago (yes…) I visited my son’s class. I read to them from my current work in progress, a novel soon to be presented IHO Mohan’s eighth birthday. Before I finished the hands were up and all the mouths were saying ‘Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!’ They had plans for my principal foil, a character named…
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Sex Ed: Anne Frank in Africa
Without telling us the punchlines, Dutch researchers announced this week the discovery of four dirty jokes papered over in Anne Frank’s diary. I taught the diary as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi two decades ago, curious from the start why it was on the curriculum. My students faced a lifetime of grinding poverty, endemic…
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