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Colleen McMahon's Profile
Customer Reviews: 165
New Reviewer Rank: 2,048
Classic Reviewer Rank: 2,187
Helpful Votes:
1232
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Helpful Votes:
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Reviews Written by
Colleen McMahon "bookaholic" (Atlanta, GA)
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Loved this book!, November 28, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The House at Riverton reminded me in some ways of a Rebecca DuMaurier novel in its setting and atmosphere--an old house, a wealthy family, long-kept secrets. Where it differs is in the main character, not a member of the family but a long-time servant who observes the interactions of the family members and their guests in their gilded environment but is outside of it. The story is a fascinating glimpse into the time that young poor girls went "into service" and became full time members of great households, who took the notion of duty to that family seriously, and kept their secrets carefully. The story is told in flashbacks from the current day, as a modern day researcher carefully pries the truth about a mysterious death and the role of the two daughters of the house in that event. This adds the dimension of the narrator herself remembering what seems to be an impossibly distant world, having lived through the latter 20th century life of Britain as well, and yet she had been a part of it, and no one thought to ask her her thoughts on it and memories of it until it was almost too late. I found the main story suspenseful and the framing story to be touching and interesting, but most of all I came away from this book feeling like I had soaked in the atmosphere and reality of a world long gone from the scene. Very enjoyable.
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Run
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by Ann Patchett
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $17.13 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Just couldn't get into this book, November 28, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I have read other works by Ann Patchett and enjoyed them, but Run left me as cold as the wintery environment in which it is set. It is the story of a Boston politician who has two adopted African American sons, and what happens after they inadvertently discover their birth mother and biological sister. The characters were well drawn but their story did not engage me as I had hoped it would and it was a real slog to get to the unsatisfying ending of the book. I would Patchett's prior novel Bel Canto or her very moving memoir, Truth and Beauty, over this novel.
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Fascinating history of the interaction of disease and development, November 28, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I picked up this book out of a mild curiosity about malaria, something I know little about but I do have a fascination with the way biology intersects history. Not only did I find this book to be a readable exposition of how development patterns and efforts to control and fight malaria have changed and often increased exposure to it, I actually had a hard time putting down a book that would seem to be a fairly dry topic.
The author gives an overview of the types of malaria, the mosquitos that tend to carry them, the variety of symptoms and effects that they have on humans, and the conditions that best foster the entire disease process of germ/parasite/insect/human. Then it gets really interesting, as he explores in depth 4 sites in the world which historically had malarial conditions and how human settlement and environmental changes (natural and human wrought) increased, decreased and changed the experience of the disease. He then moves on to tackle the effects of concentrated attempts to wipe out malaria worldwide in the 20th century and the successes and failures of those attempts, before wrapping up with a look at more effective ways to combat the disease.
Overall I found the historical chapters the most fascinating. To see how malaria increased and decreased over time in places ranging from the southern US to eastern Europe was really interesting. There is good scientific material here but it is all written in a very readable narrative and as a layperson, I understood what was going on. The author concentrates on telling the story and there is a minimum of graphs, number crunching and statistics, which I appreciated as those tend to make my eyes glaze over.
This book is a must read for anyone engaged in policy making on malaria prevention and is instructive for anyone working on larger issues of combating disease and poverty, or even of economic development and the environment. I am none of those things, just a curious reader, and I found the book to be edifying and enjoyable.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
An Economic World I Didn't Realize Existed, November 28, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
We take currency for granted. It's pieces of paper and chunks of metal and we engage in a collective act of faith when we all join in believing it's worth $5.00 or 5 cents or whatever it says on it. We take on faith that those pieces of paper and chunks of metal are backed by our government.
But in the United States it was not always that way. In the 18th and 19th century, banks around the nation issued their own currency to represent the stock of precious metal they actually had on hand. People had to make their own decision whether to engage in the act of faith that a particular piece of paper meant a particular bank's word was good. On top of that, with thousands of competing currency designs circulating, counterfeiters flourished. The effect of all of this on the market, the economy and growth of the US and our very form of government makes for a more fascinating story than I expected, approaching a book of economic history.
By focusing on the people who were gaming the system, the counterfeiters, author Stephen Mihm gives an interesting twist to what could be a very dry topic. Lively personalities appear, who, while largely forgotten now, had tremendous influence on the growth of the US economy in the first half of the 19th century.
Mihm has accomplished an impressive feat here, writing both a well-researched dissertation on a less-studied topic, and then turning it into a book that is readable for an interested layperson. I enjoyed this book.
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Box Office Poison
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by Alex Robinson
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: $19.77 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
All I can say is Wow..., November 30, 2007
I read this book (all 600+ pages) in one long sitting and I will definitely be back to read it again and savor it. It's the story of an interwoven group of friends and acquaintances, mostly in early post-college life, in New York in the mid 1990s. The book mostly focuses on Sherman, a frustrated bookstore employee/wannabe writer and Ed, his close friend who aspires to be a comic book artist. Around them orbit a host of characters, from Sherman's roommates Jane and Stephen, to elderly Golden Age comics creator Irving Flavor (Ed's "boss"), to Sherman's kind-of-crazy girlfriend to secondary and tertiary characters who drift in and out.
Alex Robinson has a great talent for both the artwork (he has a knack for individuating his characters so that it was easy to keep them all straight by their appearances) and storytelling. The dialogue and situations are naturalistic and believable, full of small and large real life dramas, struggles, questions and yes, laugh-out-loud funny moments. Every character has moments of showing deep flaws but at the same time nearly every one has a moment or two of deep nobility. Just like people.
I loved the clean black and white art style--I'm a big fan of Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For, and this book reminds me somewhat of her style--very distinct looks for each character, sharp clear images and (it's underrated but a downfall for a lot of indie books)--crisp readable lettering. I'd never make it through 600 pages of poor lettering!
Definitely not for kids (one of the characters introduces himself on page one as someone who you get to see naked a lot and he is not kidding), this is a story that will keep any adult reading and turning pages to find out how these characters' lives turn out. This is one of those graphic novels that I'll not only re-read myself, I'll recommend highly to friends and happily loan it out. Gorgeous work of art and storytelling, and richly deserved every award it won.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Listening to audiobook in public can lead to embarrassing outbursts of laughter, November 19, 2007
I listened to an unabridged audio version of this book and my review pertains to that version.
This is the third of Terry Pratchett's young adult books I've listened to on audio (via download from Audible), and the second in the Tiffany Aching series. Fledgling witch Tiffany Aching was first seen, along with her violent, often dim but always brave accomplices, the Wee Free Men, in the book called, not surprisingly, The Wee Free Men. In this sequel, Tiffany is now 11 and leaving home to begin her life as an apprentice witch. The plot involves her battles with a "hiver", a parasitic presence that latches onto a strong person and takes them over, eventually killing the host. The hiver is attracted to Tiffany's strong magic abilities and stalks her. How Tiffany "beats" the hiver and also learns a lot of important lessons about growing up (most of them applicable to non-witches out here in the real world) is only part of the attraction of this book. The rest is the rollicking storytelling voice and the humor of the interactions of the characters, particularly whenever the MacFeegles or Wee Free Men show up. Chaos and kicking nearly always ensue, and these are the parts that will get you in trouble with your neighbors on the subway as you laugh out loud at various points in the plot.
Stephen Briggs is a wonderful narrator, who has read all of the Pratchett young adult titles available through Audible. He does a great variety of voices, performing both women and children well, as well as making the MacFeegles' voices unforgettable and hilarious. The accents can occasionally be a little difficult to understand, but it's well worth the effort. Though the Tiffany Aching series and another, standalone book (The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents) are marketed as young adult titles and are certainly excellent for readers age 9-10 and above, there is much for adults to enjoy as well. Highly recommended!
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Bitter Sweets
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by Roopa Farooki
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: $13.21 |
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| Availability: In Stock |
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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Could Not Sustain My Interest, November 15, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I wanted to read this book because I've developed a great interest in novels about South Asian people and their experiences. I really enjoyed books like Monica Ali's Brick Lane and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, so I was eager to give Bitter Sweets a try.
Unfortunately I was not even able to finish the book. It was certainly readable and I enjoyed the writing style but the characters were uniformly depressing and selfish. There was so much lying--to themselves and to each other--that I simply could not make myself continue to slog through it. There may be a big comeuppance or finally some self-insight at the end of the book but I'll never know.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Lightweight, Amusing, Fun Read, October 17, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The ancient Greek gods all live in a house together in London, can't stand each other, and are slowly losing their powers. They all have day jobs, and they still have unfortunate interactions with mortals just like back in the day. When a gawky inept pair of humans who just might be secretly in love with each other run afoul of the gods, it could mean the end of the world, if gods and mortals can't work together to make things right.
This is a funny, light book and reminded me a bit of Neil Gaiman on a light-hearted day, kind of like Good Omens, the novel he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. It's nothing world-shaking but it was a fun, diverting read that kept me entertained for a couple of hours.
If you like authors like Pratchett and Douglas Adams, you might want to give this a try!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Enjoyable, Amusing Memoir, August 27, 2007
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir by A.J. Jacobs, in which he describes a year spent trying, as thoroughly as possible, to live literally all the commandments decreed in the Bible.
A very secular Jew, Jacobs seems to connect more with the Old Testament commandments than those of the new, and spends more time on them (to be fair, the bulk of the commandments are found there) but in a go-it-alone fashion. He interviews and connects with various tutors who show him the traditional Jewish way of performing several of the commandments (mitzvot) and he tries them but also uses his own adaptations.
Parts of the book were laugh out loud funny, as when his wife, unhappy with his concerns of menstrual contamination, sits on every surface in the house, leaving him to resort to his own traveling cane-seat to avoid "impurities". However, almost in spite of himself, Jacobs finds himself on a true spiritual journey. He finds that some of his disciplines work well for him and begin to open him up to a dimension that he hadn't previously suspected or connected with in any way, and lead him to ruminate on how to raise his own child and continue his path after the year is completed.
Most of all, the book is an extremely entertaining and quick read. I enjoyed it and have already been recommending it to friends and family.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Disappointing..., August 18, 2007
Meh. I was hoping for more in a book of true crime by a well-reviewed mystery author, but this is just an uneditted collection of Connelly's crime-related newspaper stories from his journalist days of the 1980s and early 1990s. The stories are almost all straight newspaper stories, with all the negatives that implies--little nuance, straight facts, lots of repetitions over a series of stories about the same crime. I was hoping for something more like Ann Rule's "Crime Files" books--yes, reprints, but with some perspective and rewriting. A few of the stories were more interesting, in particular "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight", which is a longer article telling the story of an almost comically inept gang of hitman-wannabes, who unfortunately succeeded in killing a couple of their targets. This story must have been a Sunday feature or magazine article because it had more development and room to breathe without all the repetition of background details.
Okay, but I expected more from someone with Connelly's reputation.
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(Atlanta, GA)
