Epinions Recent Reviews for ebolles

Meyebela: Muslim Girlhood in Bangladesh

Sun, 5 Jan 2003 13:07:31 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Meyebela is the childhood memoir of a girl born in Bangladesh in the early 1960s. The author eventually became a physician and activist and she has published 18 books in Bengali, some of which like this one, have only recently been translated into...

Pack mentality, sentient sea anemones, and a 30,000-year-old studmuffin

Fri, 16 Aug 2002 13:31:44 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge is a fairly involved read, definitely not a book you can polish off during a few hours at the beach. The beginning of the book, especially, introduces some highly complex and unusual ideas that take a little...

Kushiel's Dart: Epic Dark Fantasy with an Unusual Heroine

Sat, 13 Jul 2002 16:04:26 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey is one of those rare books I find difficult to rate. I should probably give this novel four stars because it is unquestionably above average in many ways, but its flaws are serious enough that I can't bring...

The Red Tent: Re-imagining Women of the Old Testament

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:51:55 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - I know I am not alone when I say that most of the depictions of women in the Old Testament are, quite frankly, about as interesting as dirt. The figures who are mentioned in any detail are just a handful of stereotypes: Esther (a Cinderella story),...

Off Season Bliss at Elbow Beach

Sun, 2 Dec 2001 15:23:51 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Earlier this month I had the wonderful experience of spending a week at Elbow Beach Hotel in Paget Parish, Bermuda.

First, The Beach...

Elbow Beach Hotel overlooks the beach of the same name, unquestionably one of the most...

The Last Dive: A Father & Son's Fatal Descent into the Ocean's Depths: The Last Dive: A Father and Son’s Deaths Illuminate the World of Technical Diving

Thu, 23 Aug 2001 21:23:34 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - “To die while diving is one thing, but to die poorly is to wipe clean all of the tributes and laurels we might have gathered during our diving careers...[we] admire the lost cave diver who stubbornly clings to life to the end, breathing down his tanks...

New England Bloodbath

Mon, 6 Aug 2001 16:11:35 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Marlborough has been laid waste, with only three houses left standing. In Narragansett, Warwick and Providence almost all buildings have been destroyed. Many houses have been burnt in Springfield, Scituate, Lancaster, Brookfield and Northampton. The...

Shawme-Crowell: Sober, No-Frills Camping on Lower Cape Cod (just Beware of Bikers and Bigfoot)

Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:35:15 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Location

Shawme-Crowell State Forest is located on Rte. 130 in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It is a good location to avoid much of the hideous summer traffic on Cape Cod and stay within a short drive of much of the lower and mid-cape...

Shuffling off this mortal coil

Wed, 20 Jun 2001 18:39:45 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - "I must go in, the fog is rising." -- Emily Dickinson's last words

"Why, man, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist--" -- American Civil War General John Sedgwick's last words, at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse

"I beg...

A plain and ordinary treasure

Thu, 7 Jun 2001 08:28:56 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - This book tricked me. It fooled me into thinking at first that it was about mostly small things, really not much more than brief glimpses into the lives of a few characters. I was also caught off guard by how carefully structured the novel is. The...

Quick -- someone swat that thing that landed on her head!

Sat, 2 Jun 2001 23:35:40 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - William Thatcher is a squire who longs to become a knight, something considered unobtainable to those not of noble birth. When the knight he serves dies suddenly in the middle of a tournament, William decides he will joust in his place and convinces his...

Modern Culture's Female Frankenstein

Sat, 12 May 2001 11:14:22 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Imagine you wanted to design a time capsule that when opened thousands of years from now would leave no doubt that women at the beginning of 21st century were vacuous bimbos whose lives revolved around obsession about their appearance and a constant hunt...

Procrastinators, read this -- now!

Tue, 24 Apr 2001 16:57:26 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - You know who you are. You have that great novel/screenplay/biography/whatever in your head. You may have an outline, notes, and maybe even a partial manuscript. You want to start writing (or finish), you really do, yet you never seem to get around to it...

Weird alien life and D.C. politicians...but I repeat myself

Fri, 13 Apr 2001 11:54:06 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Think the government ever screws with the American public? In Little Green Men by Christopher Buckley this is a literal truth for thousands of ordinary people who have been victims of a decades old government conspiracy to perpetuate a fringe...

A touching memoir about the tragic and miraculous

Wed, 21 Mar 2001 19:40:40 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - This is a beautiful book, both in what it says and how it says it. It is the true story of Martha Beck, who in 1987 discovered that she was pregnant with a child with Down syndrome, and the struggles and spiritual transformation she and her husband went...

Fairmont: The Fairmont Copley Hotel: Pseudo-decadent Indifference

Sun, 4 Mar 2001 18:55:52 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - I stayed at the Fairmont Copley in Boston for the first time this weekend -- and definitely the last. This hotel, which purports to be a luxury hotel, was a major disappointment. The problem is, my personal expectations for luxury were not all that high...

A Beautiful - if Confused - Tale of Romance and Anguish

Sat, 3 Feb 2001 12:32:51 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - Two of the four stars I'm giving this film belong to Gillian Anderson. Without her performance, this film would be somewhat of a clunker, but she manages to lift it above quite a few shortcomings. The House of Mirth is based upon the classic novel...

Take off the plain brown wrapper and indulge

Sun, 31 Dec 2000 18:21:12 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - During yesterday’s nor’easter, I curled up with this book and read it straight through in a few hours. (It helped that my wacko cat actually slept peacefully in my lap for a change while I read instead of trying to constantly sit on my book). Anyway,...

Giant horny birds, boobheads, and Hitler as a French maid

Fri, 10 Nov 2000 12:27:11 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - The opening scene of this film lets you know exactly what type of movie you have gotten yourself into. A peeping tom falls out of a tree to his death. His soul plummets to hell and satan decides his fitting punishment: to be chased by a giant horny bird...

Practical Amazon Training with Less Fluff

Tue, 19 Sep 2000 21:53:16 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - At last, a weight training magazine that doesn’t completely frighten me or insult my intelligence. In my ongoing attempt to look like a buff amazon, I have been buying all the muscle mags that looked like they stood a chance of being more than Cro-Magnon...

Trapped in a Steel Coffin

Sat, 9 Sep 2000 01:09:27 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - The Terrible Hours by Peter Maas is a must read for anyone riveted by the Kursk submarine disaster. It is an account of the US sub Squalus that sank off the coast of New Hampshire in 1939. In the initial moments of the crisis, many...

What the heck happened in 1066 anyway?

Mon, 28 Aug 2000 23:21:31 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - This book is what history books should be. Not dry, not written for some esoteric audience of history scholars – in other words, not boring in the least. This is a small book – under 200 pages – that focuses on that pivotal year in English history...

Rid yourself of pesky, unwanted chest hair

Tue, 22 Aug 2000 19:32:32 GMT

rating: 2/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - I have been on a free weight kick lately. Maybe it’s because I am getting closer to the big 3-0, but suddenly the subtle toning effects of nautilus are no longer good enough. Before I merely wanted to look like Xena, warrior princess, but now I want to...

The Bank for Recovering Merger Victims

Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:25:39 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - A while ago I wrote a review of Fleet Financial Corp and how terrible they are and how they have bungled the recent takeover of BankBoston. I ended up deleting it because every time I saw it on my epinions page it would put me in a bad mood as I...

The Preferred Pasty White Protection

Sat, 29 Jul 2000 18:42:14 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author ebolles - I am the palest of the pale. Buck white with fair hair and eyes. I have inherited genes from ancestors who obviously spent centuries living in some far northern clime where it rained or snowed 98% of the year and sunshine was a freak occurrence that...