John Abrahams

About John Abrahams

John Abrahams (@headlettuce) is a Brooklyn-based financial services product manager, writer, reader, music lover, and consumer of bandwidth and Diet Coke.

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May 20, 2013

A Modern Classic That Endures: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men

Nearly seventy years ago, Robert Penn Warren wrote All the King’s Men. It is a book people respect; it also turns out to be a book that people still really like.

May 10, 2013

Next Up for Mary Roach: How Things Go Down in Gulp

Mary Roach brings her trademark scientific humor to a brand-new topic, with Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. Sign us up.

April 27, 2013

The Intersection of Foreign and Familiar: Taiye Selasi’s Debut, Ghana Must Go

Even before Ghana Must Go was released this March, the publishing industry was abuzz about the prospects for Taiye Selasi’s debut novel. Selasi’s tale, about the complicated dynamics in an immigrant family, covers territory that will be both familiar and completely foreign to many readers.

April 23, 2013

Step to the Psychological Edge: Paul Cleave’s The Killing Hour

If you read mysteries – and who doesn’t? – you know that there are literally dozens of subgenres. From Sherlock to Stieg Larsson, Matlock to Millhone, each style offers its own approach to detection and its own depiction of human depravity. So, fair notice: Paul Cleave’s The Killing Hour probably won’t appeal to the cats-and-tea-cosies set. Everyone else: Keep reading.

April 20, 2013

‘The Hangover’ to the Nth Degree: Dave Barry’s Insane City

For the past decade or so, columnist Dave Barry has concentrated on writing fiction, which is the best strategy if you want to write about a police chase down Biscayne Boulevard involving a Cadillac Escalade driven by a frantic groom on his wedding day, sitting next a woman who is neither his bride nor a stripper but keeps getting mistaken for both. And an angry orangutan.

March 15, 2013

The Curious Mystery of Perception: Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations

Oliver Sacks' intriguing new eBook invites us to think about all the ways that humans routinely perceive things that don't exist, and in the process, stretch our understanding of how our brains work.

February 28, 2013

Fixing a Failed Foreign Policy: Russ Feingold’s While America Sleeps

Senator Feingold argues that in this post-9/11 era our failure to meet real challenges and tendency toward dumbed-down discourse is leaving us vulnerable to threats abroad and at home. Fortunately, it’s not too late to do something about it.

February 18, 2013

John Banville’s Ancient Light: An Uneasy Meditation on Love and Memory

John Banville's latest is an exploration of the past shaping the present as an aging actor reflects on an illicit affair, his tragic relationship with his daughter, and the struggle to discern the truth in memory.

February 4, 2013

From Nowhere to Newfoundland: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

You may be familiar with the film, The Shipping News, but the novel includes unforgettable characters against the fierce nature of Newfoundland and a slow-blooming romance that seems more real than anything Hollywood could conjure up.

January 31, 2013

If a Band Plays in the Forest: Meet Joe Oestreich, Hitless Wonder

Welcome to Joe Oestreich's hilarious and poignant rock-and-roll memoir about his power-pop band, Watershed, that never quite made it to the big time.

January 25, 2013

Radioactive Homeland: Kristen Iverson’s Full Body Burden

Kristen Iversen's powerful account of growing up near the Rocky Flats plant that manufactured the trigger at the heart of every atom bomb made in the US from the 1950s to the 1980s, and the resulting lingering tragedy.

January 21, 2013

Bernhard Schlink’s Summer Lies: Stories that Ponder the Meaning of the Past

Bernhard Schlink, author of the acclaimed novel The Reader, returns with a bracing collection of short stories that addresses themes of truth, reconciliation, memory, and secrecy.

January 12, 2013

Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo: ‘Bad Boy’ Satirist on the Savage State of England

Martin Amis tells a vicious, funny saga about the London lives of thuggish Lionel Asbo and his bookish nephew, Des. From a fat lottery jackpot to pit bulls, Tabasco, and incest, they move through a series of vile events toward love and redemption.

January 7, 2013

Cambodia and Madness Through a Child’s Eyes: Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan

Vaddey Ratner depicts her own experience through the seven-year-old protagonist in her novel of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The poetic writing tells of suffering and cruelty, along with beauty and love, which together create an extraordinary and hopeful tale.

January 3, 2013

Making Marco Polo Proud: William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu

Renowned history and travel writer William Dalrymple takes us on a fascinating trip to some of the world's most restrictive countries, from Syria to Iran to China and Turkey, as he recreates Marco Polo's incredible journey across Asia in the thirteenth century.

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