Kevin Kershaw is a divorced man around 50 years old with a son from whom he drifted away and an ex-wife who needed to get away from him. He works joylessly in an insurance company office, accepting,  rejecting and challenging insurance claims by their policy holders. He does not have any real friends and he has lost his spunk to the point where he is considering ending it all.

One day, by pure coincidence, he finds a video shop in an out of  the way alley. Yes, in 2025, when we all stream Netflix, there is a shop full of VHS tapes. Kevin walks inside and gets to know the shopkeeper, an old and mysterious gentleman named Marty. He pulls out a VHS tape with Kevin’s name on it and gives it to him. There is a viewing room in the back of the shop with a small TV and an aging VHS player.

To his surprise, the short video is about Kevin himself when he was a child, showing him in scenes with his late mother. The shots were taken about his life where nobody was there to tape them at the time. It’s impossible, magical, but there it was. He soon finds out that there may be more tapes in future days, if he bothers to come back. And of course, he does.

The Last Stop Video Shop is a very slow moving story about a very boring life. For a while I found it hard to read, but it picked up the pace as it went along. There were eventually some uplifting experiences, as Kevin took the lessons from the videos seriously and made incremental improvements, which not only shaped his life, but those around him that the cared for.

 

 

2.5 stars

When you pick up a Stephen King novel you know you will be entertained. King is an excellent story-teller, and his characters always come out clear and real. The amount of detail is almost overwhelming, like watching an IMAX film in a high-resolution theater. You are right in the middle of it.

In Never Flinch, King tells the intertwining story of one serial killer with daddy issues, and one vigilante religious nut who is out to silence a woman’s rights activist by trying to kill her. The plot lines are intricate and carefully crafted. The story takes place in Iowa (mostly) in today’s world.

King has always been good about weaving in current events. Trump is in the story, so is JD Vance, the characters use the latest technologies, iPhones, social media and web sites. You can tell on every page that this plays right now. It becomes real.

The story itself is a crime thriller. He narrates it in the present tense, switching between the different characters and going deep into their psyches. King highlights the issues of religious zealous activism, people damaged by their  incompetent and outright abusive parents and the matter of abortion rights in the age of post-Dobbs.

I gave it only 2.5 stars for several reasons: The story itself, while it gave me some insight, didn’t really teach me anything. It’s just a thriller. I found no redeeming literary value. But this is Stephen King. He wrote many books that were much better overall, and this one was okay, but definitely not even in his top five, in my opinion.

In summary, Never Flinch is superb, vivid and masterfully told entertainment, and entertainment only.

Marian Schembari was 34 years old when she finally learned she was autistic. Until then, through her childhood, youth, adolescence, college years, first loves, marriage and arrival of her first child, she just thought she didn’t fit in. She was made believe “there was something wrong with her.” Therapists and psychiatrists diagnosed her with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, social anxiety, and recurrent depression. But whatever they prescribed, it never helped, and sometimes the side effects were worse than the problem in the first place.

A Little Less Broken is a passionate autobiography. Marian tells her story from her point of view, and we get to understand what autism is, and what it feels like. To that end, the book helps greatly in understanding autism and dealing with autistic people, understanding them, and recognizing them.

I have read several books by another famous autistic person, Daniel Tammet.

Born on a Blue Day was very insightful and shows how vastly different an autistic savant thinks about concepts that are ordinary to the rest of us.

In Embracing the Wide Sky, Tammet illustrates how the mind works.

A Little Less Broken, unlike Tammet’s books, is less of a technical or illustrative story, but rather the emotional and passionate recollection of growing up in a body and mind that did not seem to fit in with the rest of the world.

 

Bird Gardner is twelve years old and lives with his father, who used to be a linguist and college professor, but now works in a university library shelving books. They live in a small apartment in a dorm on campus. Bird’s mother Margaret, a Chinese-American poet, the daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, disappeared when he was nine years old. He does not remember much about her and he resents her for abandoning them.

One day a mysterious letter arrives filled only with drawings and no words. Bird goes on a quest to find its meaning and eventually steals away to go on a trip to find his mother. When he finally finds her in New York City under mysterious circumstances, he learns of her love and her own private battle for justice and decency.

Our Missing Hearts plays in America of today, in an alternate society where there was a severe economic downturn, akin to the Great Depression, some fifteen years before the story starts. They called it The Crisis. Businesses failed, unemployment was rampant, many lost their homes, livelihoods, possessions and hope. The country needed a scapegoat, some explanation why things happened to them.

In Germany, in the 1930s, Hitler faced such a nation under such a crisis. He invented a scapegoat, somebody whose fault it was: The Jews. In the America of Our Missing Hearts, the leaders blamed the Chinese, and by association any Asian-Americans. Of course China was to blame for America’s demise. And as we reacted to Japanese-Americans in World War II, putting them into camps, so did America isolate Chinese-Americans in this story. Bird’s mother, being the daughter of Chinese immigrants, had the face that betrayed her origins. Her poetry, without being political, was misinterpreted as unpatriotic, and quickly banned.

The government started to separate children from their immigrant parents under the guise of protecting them from the unamerican influences of their parents. All this rings true. In 2018, the American government separated children and parents of immigrant families at the border. Their crimes: being children of parents desperate enough in their home countries to flee in search of better lives, safer lives and more prosperous lives. The American government told us that immigrants were taking away our jobs, they were animals, vermin, that had to be deported at a minimum. We were taking their children from them to protect the children. It’s now six years later, and there are still over 1,000 of those children who are not yet reunited with their families:

The Trump administration’s family separation policy remains a lasting and disgraceful legacy of that administration and of the United States as a nation. Under the policy, formally known as “Zero Tolerance,” the US government forcibly separated migrant children from their parents as a deliberate measure to deter others from attempting to migrate or seek asylum. Crueler still, the federal agencies that separated families failed to track which children were separated from which parents. In total, at least 5,569 children were separated from their parents or guardians under the Trump administration, a figure that includes separations during and after the formal zero tolerance policy. More than 1,000 children remain separated from their parents as of November 30, 2023. Out of these 1,000 children, the government’s Family Reunification Task Force still does not have any ability to contact 68 of the separated parents, further complicating the reunification process and prolonging families’ suffering.

— ReliefWeb

Our Missing Hearts tells of the collective suffering that occurs in a society that suddenly decides that some subgroup is the reason why the society is in decline.

It happened before in many other countries, and it’s happening right now in the United States. Slowly, gradually, we are getting desensitized, and more and more of us are willing to commit atrocities in the name of our country.

…You won’t have a country anymore……

I would never have picked up Goyhood to read. I would never have come across it, had it not been for the author contacting me directly with a request to review the pre-release of the book. The one paragraph synopsis he provided sounded entertaining, so I committed to giving it a try.

Mayer and David Belkin are fraternal twins who grow up in a very small town in rural Georgia raised by a single mom, or perhaps not raised by her. She is definitely in over her head and the boys are pretty much raising each other. What could go wrong?

One day they come home to find a rabbi at their front door talking to their mother. The conversation and introduction to the boys ends up changing the life of Mayer fundamentally. Eventually he leaves the small town to go the Brooklyn, New York, study in a Jewish college and become a Talmud scholar. Through a sequence of sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time, he is invited to marry into a prominent Jewish family. Eventually he is a super-orthodox Jew and completely estranged from his twin brother and his mother.

When their mother dies unexpectedly, Mayer travels back to Georgia and meets up with his brother David. Together they find out family secrets that totally upend both of their lives. To recover, the brothers decide to go on a road trip through the south, from Georgia to New Orleans and back, performing a series of antics and adventures. For both of them, the trip reveals who they really are and what they really want to do with their lives.

This is a road trip story, a little bit like Thelma and Louise, a little bit like On the Road, and a lot like The Lincoln Highway. A group of strange characters get thrown together in a car to work out the mysteries of their lives.

The story is entertaining, but I think you need to be a Jew, or at least interested in Judaism, to really appreciate it. The complications that arose in Mayer’s life that he and his brother had to work through are all based on Jewish doctrine, which has no meaning to a non-religious person like me. I actually felt glad that I wasn’t Jewish and didn’t have what I consider contrived complications in my life.

Most religions seem to try to convert non-believers into their fold. Some have it as their central mission to proselytize and get others drawn in. I have always admired the Jewish for seemingly being the opposite. You don’t get in, and it seems like you’re never really accepted unless you’re born into it, and – as I learned in this book – unless your mother was a Jew. I respect the Jewish religion not for its teachings or its tradition, but simply because it appears to value education as one of its highest goals.

I learned a lot about the lives of orthodox Jews by reading this book, more than I ever thought I would, but I must admit that I skimmed over many sections that went too much into scripture and God just to get the story moving forward.