Epinions Recent Reviews for caravan70

Thirty Years Before Cesar Chavez, a Bloody Struggle for a Living Wage

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 07:37:23 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - If you travel down Highway 101 these days through Gilroy, and cut over to the coastal location of the new California State University at Monterey Bay, you’ll pass through fields of artichokes, rows of asparagus and lifetimes of meaning and struggle...

Romance that Comes Naturally, On-Screen and Off

Sat, 17 Feb 2001 07:09:42 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - This review is an entry in the Valentine's Day Romantic Movie Write-Off, organized by teskue and involving the following talented participants:

AmyLEnsor, dandj, flak-attak, frazzledspice, hhire, isinga, james23, jankp, jenni1396,...

The Costs of Betrayal, Public and Private

Thu, 7 Dec 2000 04:57:37 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - You'll find this title, a Booker Prize finalist, in stores under the title An Obedient Father.

Judging Ram Karan, the central character in Akhil Sharma's first novel, An Obedient Father, wouldn't seem a very difficult...

A Masterpiece Distilled from a Bloated Effort

Sun, 26 Nov 2000 07:54:19 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - In The Dyer's Hand, a 1962 collection of literary ruminations, W.H. Auden gives us the following as one of the essential functions a critic can perform:

Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read...

Illiterate Write-off: Great! I love it!

Sun, 3 Sep 2000 23:54:10 GMT
rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - (Disclaimer: This review is part of the Illiterate Write-off, which I'm participating in belatedly because of some ISP problems. The views expressed may or may not be my own. The awful prose, however, is all mine.)

I found Savage...

Three Vocal Vines, Entwined and Triumphant

Tue, 29 Aug 2000 03:16:23 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - I search out records like an addict with a raging jones. If the price is reasonable, I buy albums I've never heard recorded by bands I'm only vaguely aware of. Naturally, I get some pretty stellar stuff from time to time, and a lot of dross as well...

A Magnavox, and an Essential Rock Album

Wed, 16 Aug 2000 14:53:25 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - I still can't identify exactly what drew me to Elvis so much as a child. My father went into the mail-order record business as a sideline to his regular work around the time I was six. One day he hit the mother lode: a collection of around 10,000...

Lessons for Today from the Ultimate Political Raconteur

Sun, 13 Aug 2000 05:31:20 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - There's a fairly pervasive belief nowadays that politics is a concern that's the exclusive domain of operatives-for-hire, moneyed interests and annoying talk-show cat-fighters. There are problems with our system today, and plenty of reasons to be...

The Modern Age, Technically and Spiritually

Sun, 6 Aug 2000 22:51:43 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb chronicles a period unique in world history, an age when brilliant minds in the service of numerous countries collaborated to create the most destructive weaponry we've yet seen, but at the same time...

Fireside Book of Baseball: The National Game in a Fireside Chair

Wed, 26 Jul 2000 17:34:14 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - There's a good reason that one of the finest baseball collections ever assembled is entitled The Fireside Book of Baseball. After all, in midwinter, when bats are silent and fields are frozen over, you'll want to grab this book, settle in an easy...

London as a Swirling Mosaic in a Young Writer's Eyes

Tue, 25 Jul 2000 16:07:17 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Already hailed by many reviewers as a contemporary classic, White Teeth, the debut novel of 24-year-old Zadie Smith, is a fascinating, deftly-rendered evocation of the cultural mosaic that is modern London. Although it ultimately fails to convey...

A More than Serviceable Chardonnay

Sun, 23 Jul 2000 03:35:27 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Sometimes good things arise from bad experiences. I'd planned to review the only Louis Jadot wine I could find on relatively short notice, the 1998 Mâcon-Villages Chardonnay, on a Friday, the due date for write-off submissions, and failed to do so due...

Passion and Conviction in a Poet's Life

Thu, 13 Jul 2000 22:26:46 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - The poetry of William Butler Yeats has been meaningful to me since early adolescence. As I've grown older, my focus on his work has changed: his early lyrical works appealed to me first, while over time the more mystical, regretful musings of his later...

GEW: The "Other" Fast-Food Restaurant...

Thu, 13 Jul 2000 13:49:06 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - For a long time, Burger King locations were almost invisible to me. After all, I'd almost always been taken to McDonald's as a child, and virtually everyone I knew condemned Burger King as a second-rate imitator (not that I had any inkling at first that...

The Personal and the Political in a Writer's Autobiography

Mon, 26 Jun 2000 22:14:39 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Since the days of Rousseau, it's been generally agreed that a good autobiography does much more than recount the events of its author's past. It's a study of the forces that shape a life and a worldview - in the case of a writer of fiction, it shows us...

Die-Cut Covers and Swirling, Transcendent Psychedelia...

Sat, 24 Jun 2000 03:38:56 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - It's easy for me to rattle off a series of British psychedelic albums that never seem to leave my turntable once they're firmly settled… the Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn, T2's It'll All Work Out in Boomland, Caravan's If I...

Identity and Campus Politics in the Berkshires

Fri, 23 Jun 2000 13:49:12 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Philip Roth's The Human Stain is the concluding volume of a trilogy that began with 1997's American Pastoral and continued with 1999's I Married A Communist. It unites several classic Roth concerns - the role of race and class in...

The Epochs of Stalin and Caesar, Linked and Redeemed

Wed, 21 Jun 2000 23:00:32 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Banned in the Soviet Union until its publication as a serial in Moskva beginning in the fall of 1966, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is a powerful novel that in a surreal, almost magic realist style limns the everyday realities...

Taco Bell Saved My Buzz! Tales of Canine Despotism...

Tue, 13 Jun 2000 23:58:53 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - This review is part of a write-off that also includes reviewers that-guy, gogigantes, Elorraine, kchowell, cmuir, and lpmiller. I urge you to read their inspired reviews as well.

I can't help associating Taco Bell with high school...

Cars, Trucks and the Roads on Which We Travel

Wed, 31 May 2000 22:08:05 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - [Updated May 16, 2009 to remove a disclaimer - thanks to sleeper54, I am now aware that there is a separate category for this wonderfully essential Richard Scarry book!]This review is part of a children's book write-off. The following...

Beauty and Conviction, Fresh from the Sunset Strip

Sun, 28 May 2000 04:10:28 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Love has never been particularly underrated or ignored; it's just that the fond recollections aren't there for a lot of people. They were largely a club band, and although they were a Los Angeles institution from their formation in 1965 until the...

A Future Noir Master, Preparing to Fly

Thu, 25 May 2000 19:10:14 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - This review is part of a "Pulp Write-Off" in which grouch, mshawpyle, frazzledspice, erik_kosberg, and cornelia are also participating. You'll want to check out their reviews of Now and On Earth as well.

Mention the...

The Past and the Future, Celebrated and Turned into Song

Mon, 15 May 2000 19:09:18 GMT
rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - (This review is the product of a write-off in which Arazim and I are writing about the work of Richard Thompson, the British songwriter and guitarist. I encourage you to visit his opinion.)

Fairport Convention was one of the first bands in a...

A New Life, With an Old Friend's Help

Tue, 9 May 2000 16:07:03 GMT
rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - Saul Bellow has sallied forth at this seemingly late date with a tremendous tribute to his friend and University of Chicago colleague, Allen Bloom, in the form of his latest novel, Ravelstein. There has been much argument over this book's merits;...

What Kind of Break Do You Deserve?

Sun, 30 Apr 2000 22:15:14 GMT
rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author caravan70 - (This review is the product of a McDonald's "write-off" in which a number of writers, including Amyann16, file13, gracef and WorkingMomof2 are participating. You'll find their reviews, which I encourage you to read, in this category as...