Karl Helicher, Book Reviewer

Karl Helicher enjoyed a forty-three-year long career as a public librarian, mostly as the director of the Upper Merion Township Library in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. He retired in 2016. He continues to review books for Foreword, which he started doing in 1999, and Library Journal, which he began working with in 1982.

He received his MLS from the University of Pittsburgh in 1973; he has an MA in political science and an MSA in public administration, both from his undergraduate alma mater, West Chester University. He received Library Journal’s Non-Fiction Reviewer of the Year Award in 1999.

Book Review

Those Who Know Don't Say

by Karl Helicher

The judicial system’s bias against minorities has deep roots, acknowledges Garrett Felber in Those Who Know Don’t Say, which argues that the penal, or carceral, state expanded due to “dialects of discipline.” It shows that police... Read More

Book Review

Frenemy Nations

by Karl Helicher

Even when nations and states share geographical boundaries, they are often very different places, writes Mary Soderstrom in "Frenemy Nations". Indeed, the book argues that boundaries are often created in an arbitrary way that ignores... Read More

Book Review

Camera Hunter

by Karl Helicher

Born in 1859 into wealth and political power—his father was a Supreme Court justice; he served in Congress—George Shiras III’s long life spanned the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal. James H. McCommons’s engaging... Read More

Book Review

Black Indian

by Karl Helicher

In her memoir "Black Indian", Shonda Buchanan researches four generations of her family to uncover the brutalities that its women suffered from their husbands, boyfriends, and parents. It’s a dark legacy that shattered and, in some... Read More

Book Review

The Banker and the Blackfoot

by Karl Helicher

The seemingly improbable friendship between Jack Cowdry, author J. Edward Chamberlin’s grandfather and a white rancher and banker, and Crop Eared Wolf, a warrior and Blackfoot chief, is recalled in the warm historical account, "The... Read More

Load More