Current Book Reviews
FullReviews Index - page 2
The Names of Rivers
Watega County is supposedly somewhere in Illinois, but Daniel Buckman places it smack dab in the twilight zone. Every man in every generation of the farming and factory families of Watega County went off to war, and for each lucky enough to return home, time stopped.
Dogme Uncut
In 1995, an irreverent group of Danish film directors gave birth to a new aesthetic known as Dogme 95. Launched by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg the movement preached a back-to-basics style of filmmaking at odds with mainstream trends.
Global Village Idiot: Dubya, Dunces, and One Last Word Before You Vote
John O’Farrell is a columnist with the Guardian as well as a writer for the TV show Spitting Image and a joke writer for Tony Blair (not the one that is a fake puppet on Spitting image, but the one that is the real puppet of George W. Bush). Global Village Idiot is a reprinting of many of his Guardian columns over the period of time beginning with George W. Bush on the campaign trail and ending on the desert trails leading to Baghdad.
Gotham Tragic
Kurt Wenzel's quick moving new novel Gotham Tragic is the sequel to his debut Lit Life. It is a New Yorker style fiction piece in which the main character lands himself in the sights of a group of militant Muslims, who, angered by his offensive diatribe, call a fatwa against the author, effectively placing a bounty on the head. And this is just the beginning of his troubles.
Before, During & After: Poems
Hal Sirowitz is the author of six books of poetry, although probably best known for the volumes Mother Said (Crown), & My Therapist Said (Crown). He has had work in numerous anothologies and periodicals, such as Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe (Henry Holt),
Verses That Hurt (St. Martin's Press), Chelsea and
Hanging Loose. He's a 1994 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, & reads regularly in New York, as well as internationally.
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters
"The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters" is dark, bitterly funny, strangely sexual account of two orphaned sisters living in a antique store, desperately trying to make order of the past. A fairytale gone awry, it has everything you could ever ask for in a short story...
Appleby House
Appleby House should be commended for being such a unique piece of literature, an everyday account of the slight difficulties of human existence without ever venturing towards embellishment and never coming near over-sentimentality. It never tries to wow you or win you over, but somehow it captivates with utter divine normality.
Ten Little Indians
“Nine is a much funnier number than eleven,” explained Sherman Alexie in a recent book signing for Ten Little Indians, a collection of nine contemporary Native American tales. This much-anticipated work dances the line between banality and classic Alexie brilliance at its best, leaving the reader exuberate at its finish, but almost wishing they hadn’t read those first few.
Middlesex
To call Middlesex a coming-of-age novel about a hermaphrodite would be like calling The Odyssey a story about some guy on a boat. Middlesex is nothing short of epic; one family's survival on a twisted path through Greece to 20th Century America; battles ranging from the fires of the Turkish wars, the igniting of Michigan race riots, and the burning desires hidden within a girl named Callie and the man named Cal who she is to become.
Over the Edge of the World
In Over the Edge of the World, an engaging account of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, Laurence Bergreen draws the early sixteenth century with so much seethingly lifelike detail that the reader is drawn into the story even as Magellan himself remains something of an enigma.
The Bay of Noon
The Bay of Noon is Shirley Hazzard's 1970 classic story about a friendship between two women; Jenny, an English diplomatic assistant on assignment in post-WWII Italy. And Gioconda, the sole mistress of a decaying ancestral home rooted in the heart of Naples.
Bringing Down the House
Backed by anonymous investors and armed only with their audacity and their intellect, a team of MIT math students cleaned Vegas out of more than $3 million in a couple of years. They used published card-counting techniques and worked in teams like secret agents. They ate statistics for breakfast, and they raked in millions of dollars before getting caught. They were a dream team. So why did they get caught?
Mr. Paradise
Roommates Kelly and Chloe are enjoying their lives and their downtown Detroit loft just fine. Kelly is a Victoria's Secret catalog model. Chloe is an escort, until she decides to ditch her varied clientele in favor of a steady gig as girlfriend to eighty-four-year-old retired lawyer Tony Paradiso, a.k.a. Mr. Paradise... Mr. Paradise is Elmore Leonard at home in Detroit and sharper than ever.
Diary
For the first time since his first novel, Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk is writing in a woman's voice, albeit the obsessed and borderline deranged voice of Diary's "heroine." However, the urgency and broken speech are so reminiscent of his earlier work that it could very well be the fantasy of Fight Club's truly psychotic narrator.
Under the Banner of Heaven
Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air was a narrative tour de force chronicling the disastrous 1996 Everest expeditions, and should be considered a classic of modern journalism. Measured against this awesome standard, Under the Banner of Heaven, a tour of mainstream Mormonism and its fundamentalist offspring, is a failure. It is a lucid and sometimes compulsively readable failure, but it lacks the narrative drive and cohesive perspective of Into Thin Air.
Pattern Recognition
Cayce Pollard inhabits a world in which disembodied voices speak suggestively to each other in boutique elevators and data is encrypted invisibly within graphical content. Is Pattern Recognition yet another William Gibsonian info-trash cluttered cyber-realm? No. Cayce Pollard's world is our own with its present-day setting marking a significant departure for Cyberpunk Godfather, William Gibson.
Out of Sheer Rage
Geoff Dyer, the author of “Out of Sheer Rage” is argumentatively one of the whiniest people on the planet. He begins the his 1997 memoir by describing the endless vacillation he experienced in setting out to write a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence, the writer who had inspired Dyer to write. After bambling back and forth as to whether or not he would be able to write this study, he settles on doing it and then proceeds to hedge about where he should live in order to write the study.
Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It
Geoff Dyer is a man who "lives in London where he spends much of his time wishing he lived in San Francisco." That's what it says on the jacket of "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It," and it's exactly the feeling of restlessness one gets from Dyer's most recent book.
Oxymoronica
Dr. Mardy Grothe is a logophiliac - a word-lover. The man loves words. He loves them so much, he collects them... gathers them and stores them away. He boasts something like 10,000 phrases that he's collected over the years. His latest book, Oxymoronica, focuses on paradoxical quotations that exhibit... well, Oxymoronica.
The Secret Life of Bees
In "The Secret Life of Bees," Sue Monk Kidd wraps a coming-of-age tale around a search for one's mother, plunks it down into the racially-charged South Carolina of the 1960s and sets it all alight with a dose of feminine spirituality. . It is an inspirational feminist tale with strong female characters.
True Notebooks
When Mark Salzman is invited to visit a writing class at Central Juvenile Hall, a lockup for Los Angeles’s most violent teenage offenders, he scrambles for a polite reason to decline. He goes—expecting the worst—and is so astonished by what he finds that he becomes a teacher there himself. True Notebooks is an account of Salzman’s first years teaching at Central. Through it, we come to know his students as he did: in their own words.
Burning Garbo
Take a sang froid ex-con assigned to photograph a reclusive Garbo-like movie star: she's knocked unconscious but nevertheless escapes a fast-moving California brush fire; outmaneuvers a conniving alcoholic cop set for blood; survives a trailer bulldozed over a cliff while she's inside; and just by the skin of her teeth, escapes an evil dentist set to pull all thirty-two of her pearly whites-sans Novocain. This story moves.
Sex and Sunsets
Kelly Palamino is not – I repeat, NOT – crazy. Yes, water does talk to him: his toilet tells him to eat fish; his Water Pik quotes Ezra Pound. His ex-wife denies they were ever married and is actively seeking to have him committed. But Kelly Palamino is not crazy. Lost? Yes… but not crazy.
I Sleep At Red Lights
“I Sleep at Red Lights” is Bruce Stockler’s account of the maelstrom that ensues when a couple become the parents of triplets plus one. It recounts the transformations a father undergoes beginning with the revelation that his family is about to triple in size and traversing through an unbearable pregnancy into the surreal and sleepless wonderland that is parenting multiple-birth infants.
Schott's Original Miscellany
Schott’s Original Miscellany is a small book, much smaller than you’d expect for what’s packed inside. It’s about the size of an average paperback, perhaps smaller. It’s the kind of book you should leave lying around on a coffee table or perhaps in the bathroom...