Carmelo Militano

About Carmelo Militano

Reviews

Heroes and Villians by David Hajdu

By Carmelo Militano

Part of what makes Hajdu such a good music critic and clever pop culture observer is his ability to see beyond the obvious. [18 November 2009]

Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk

By Carmelo Militano

Moving back and forth through memory and time, these essays act like a vehicle moving through historical, mental and natural landscapes. [9 November 2009]

Prisoner of the State by Zhao Ziyang

By Carmelo Militano

This is an excellent history lesson that should be impressed upon one's mind, much like the famous image of a solitary man standing in front of a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square. [16 July 2009]

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1964 by Susan Sontag

By Carmelo Militano

Sontag's journals suggest that the self is a conditional and transitory creation; elusive and slippery as an artful lover who wants to be a writer. [6 March 2009]

Cleopatra’s Nose by Judith Thurman

By Carmelo Militano

Thurman has the talent all gifted literary critics share, that is, an ability to combine the vivid and sensual with the hardheaded demands of the intellect. [30 January 2009]

The Best of Sexology, ed. Craig Yoe

By Carmelo Militano

In1933 Gernsback published a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-scientific magazine devoted to sex and all its mysteries, vagaries, varieties -- not to mention all its anxieties. [16 December 2008]

The Brenner Assignment by Patrick K. O’Donnell

By Carmelo Militano

O'Donnell is more interested in telling a good story rather than placing the story in the wider context of OSS operations or of the Italian campaign in general. [4 December 2008]

Beirut 1991 by Gabriele Basilico

By Carmelo Militano

These photographs do not seek to praise the mutilated city, but to express a consciousness of the collective agony of self-destruction. [27 October 2008]

The Same Man by David Lebedoff

By Carmelo Militano

Orwell and Waugh’s discomfort with modernity and opposition to totalitarianism does not make them moral writers, but it does make them political writers and social critics [16 September 2008]

Weird Indiana: by Mark Marimen

By Carmelo Militano

These stories leave the reader in a stupor, much like that induced by a long drive on the interstate through mile after mile of Indiana cornfields, as far as the eye can see. [15 August 2008]