A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

Food For The Dead: On The Trail of New England's Vampires is written by Rhode Island folklorist Michael E. Bell; it was published about ten years ago--way before the current vampire craze spawned by Twilight and True Blood and their compatriots.  The author spent two decades tracing the origin of the legends of New England's vampires, and the New England legend is not your stereotypical, Hollywood vampire. Bell uses interviews, newspaper and other published accounts, as well as town records to research various local, Rhode Island vampire legends.  He also utilizes genealogical research to trace the origin of several vampire legends back to a single Rhode Island family.  Bell paints an intriguing, fascinating and, at times, puzzling picture of Rhode Island's own vampire legend. In eighteenth and nineteenth century America a bloody, deadly and mysterious ghoul was stalking its citizens, indeed, entire families in some instances: this was the ever dreaded disease con...

In the three decades [Dickey's] been reporting on guerrilla wars and terrorist conspiracies, the fanatical hatred of countless groups has focused on New York City like a compass needle quivering toward magnetic north. from page 3 Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force--The NYPD by Christopher Dickey is the last of my nonfiction reads and I am now (happily) back to fiction. Securing the City was a riveting and interesting read. Dickey has easily accessible writing and another positive for me was the short chapters (chapter length probably plays too large a role in my enjoyment of a book... the answer lies in my reading process, but that is another post for another time). The book chronicles the sheer luck and later the sheer diligence of the work that the police put in to prevent many terrorist plots from successfully detonating on American soil. This page turner uses true accounts of countless terrorist attacks both on American soil, specifically New...

My streak of nonfiction reads continues--and ends with The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--And Why by Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine. I read a short article by Ripley in Time ; it was about the survivors of the Hudson River passenger jet crash and their behavior in the immediate aftermath of the crash. The Unthinkable is a fascinating read. Ripley examines the various stages one goes through in a disaster (for example, denial, deliberation, determination...) and the different reactions people have and why (for example, paralysis, panic, action, heroics...). It also examines who responds in what way and why they respond this way in a crisis or disaster and what we can do to improve our chances of survival in the midst of a disaster such as a fire or a tsunami or a plane crash (for example, rehearse evacuation, locate all the exits in an unfamiliar place...). Ultimately this book is an examination of human behavior as it is influenced by genetics and e...