Time was when you couldn’t move in a library in England for romance fiction: Dames Barbara and Catherine (Cartland and Cookson) dominated the shelves. Hundreds upon hundreds of copies of their titles (in large-print format very often) were loaned out by the armful.
For the second year in a row, Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is the most borrowed book in UK libraries, and James Patterson is still the most borrowed author overall, a place he has occupied for the last five years. The Public Lending Right (PLR) is the organistion that tracks the frequency of loans for any particular author’s work and enables the royalty payments to reach them. Their figures, released 3 February 2012, represent the…]]>It's a rare treat to see one writer experiment with multiple styles of storytelling. But Geoff Johns pulls it off with aplomb in "The Other Hero".
The idea hits somewhere in the third act of my Unyielding Day of Admin. Sometime long enough after lunch so that lunch isn't an accurate enough marker, and yet, still far enough away from there being any end in sight. It wasn't an idea at first. At first it was something half-formed, something I still needed to grapple with to find the exact shape of. But the signal from my unconscious, the signal that sparked…]]>Tim Hall possesses the uncanny gift to compress startling insight into short phrases with such care and concision that he could likely turn a Twitter feed into a system of philosophy.
The first line of Tim Hall’s novel, inspired by his experience writing and editing an underground New York City newspaper, Full of It, is “Some people have a city instead of a life.” In a short story from his collection, Triumph of the Won’t, the protagonist summarizes a romantic relationship from college that consisted solely of exchanging massages by saying, “Sometimes the best sex is the sex you never have.” In his novel about an…]]>Tim Hall possesses the uncanny gift to compress startling insight into short phrases with such care and concision that he could likely turn a Twitter feed into a system of philosophy.
The first line of Tim Hall’s novel, inspired by his experience writing and editing an underground New York City newspaper, Full of It, is “Some people have a city instead of a life.” In a short story from his collection, Triumph of the Won’t, the protagonist summarizes a romantic relationship from college that consisted solely of exchanging massages by saying, “Sometimes the best sex is the sex you never have.” In his novel about an…]]>Shalom Auslander is willfully outrageous in Hope: A Tragedy; a black humorist with an Old Testament moralist’s heart.
Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- There’s a fundamental and perhaps fundamentally irresolvable tension at the heart of Shalom Auslander’s first novel, Hope: A Tragedy — the tension between text and context, or between the artist and the art. Anyone who’s read Auslander’s two earlier books, the 2005 short-story collection Beware of God and the 2007 memoir Foreskin’s Lament, may know what I’m talking about: He is scabrously funny, especially on faith and meaning, but his stories have a habit of…]]>What does theology want from science? Above all, the heady feeling of mystery its own traditional texts no longer convey to a sophisticated, urban and multicultural public.
Theology, revered in the Middle Ages as the ‘Queen of Sciences’, has been pushed off the throne. In today’s globalized and technologically advanced society, it has become a marginal intellectual endeavor, still taught in many universities but largely ignored by the high priests of academic life. Meanwhile, it has remained redundant to the vast majority of believers, who don’t concern themselves too much with the fine points of intellectual debate and mostly take religion on…]]>Percival Everett's on-target satire eviscerates everyone from Oprah to your English professor.
Wow, this is a great book. I'll confess that Percival Everett's was a name unknown to me before accepting this novel for review, but it turns out Everett is an established figure, with over 20 books out there, including I Am Not Sidney Poitier, American Desert and Swimming Swimming Swimming. Erasure is the first of his books that I've read, and it's a killer. It won't be the last. Percival Everett is a black man…]]>Truly a mixed bag--the legendary Richard Corben demonstrates why his artwork has enthralled generations, yet fails to craft a narrative of similar elegance in this oneshot that brings the best of Robert E. Howard-pulp to mind.
Narrative structure is so vastly important to comicbooks, not to mention all mediums. While individual pieces can at times open in the middle and close well before the end, this type of storytelling is better exploited in pop music than in graphic literature. Murky World by Richard Corben is a comic, but plays more like a stereotypical heavy metal song. It is both frustrating in its beauty and in its inability to tell a complete…]]>This travelogue takes us four locales: Havana, Chicago, Sydney and Caracas. Each locale translates into distinctive interactions with hip-hop and its pillars of deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti.
Location, location, location. That's the mantra of the real estate industry indicating that property values are positively and negatively affected by the areas they inhabit. Hip-hop possesses a similar mantra, espoused by Rakim's "In the Ghetto": "It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at." In the United States, hip-hop has experienced spells of regionalism, wherein New York rap was hailed as hip-hop's birthplace while artists from other sections of the country sought legitimacy: bass-heavy…]]>There are incredible similarities between the analog and digital age. Unfortunately, this volume doesn't make stronger connections between the two, although it frequently wants to.
In the early years of radio listeners had great say in shaping the future of their favorite soaps, sports, and serials. Before the “sophisticated” marketing tools of today radio executives listened to their audiences. Telegrams, letters, and other communiqués helped inform the future of radio––down to plot twists, the choice of broadcasters, and microphone placement. Although there were attempts at creating homogenized radio stations, robbing local markets of their character and depriving far-flung listeners from…]]>Regardless how history comes to look Nick Cave's The Death of Bunny Munro, in the context of Cave’s career, it stands alone as the purest distillation of his artistry -- a poetic novel with Cave’s inimitable brand of the grotesque, absurd and often comic nature of humanity.
With the publication of The Death of Bunny Munro in the spring of 2009, Australian songwriter, author, and modern-day renaissance man Nick Cave unleashed on his public perhaps one of the most deviant, despicable protagonists in the entirety of modern literature. Bunny Munro -- drug abusing, chain-smoking, sex-obsessed lothario whose spree of extramarital escapades pushes his unstable wife into the cold arms of suicide and who is so inept as a father that he drags…]]>This bespeaks a warm affection for the peripatetic poets, novelists, and philosophers who witnessed Paris’s transformation from medieval to modern metropolis under the aegis of Louis XIV, Baron Haussmann, and engineers who developed gas lighting in the mid-1800s.
“There’s no city like this in the world. There never was…Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form,” says Gil Pender, the hapless, time-traveling romantic in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. “Nowhere else in Europe has a great capital developed in the same way as Paris, with such discontinuity and in so irregular a rhythm. What gave the city this rhythm was the centrifugal succession of its walled…]]>It's not that historical revisionism exists in Russia, but that the revisionism––and sometimes the downright denial of the historical record––swings to extremes.
David Satter delivers one of the most harrowing stories of all time with It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway, an examination of Russia’s Communist past, its perpetration of atrocities against its own people and others, and its frequent denial of such actions. This is a rare book by many measures, not least of which is the way in which Satter captures the magnitude of Russian atrocities and the frightening realities…]]>When examining a work whose mythology is an expansive as Star Wars, it almost becomes a historiographical investigation as opposed to a literary one.
When examining a work whose mythology is an expansive as Star Wars, it almost becomes a historiographical investigation as opposed to a literary one. Between the films, the television series, the dozens of books and the hundreds of comics, piecing together where the various stories fit into the grand historical narratives and the requisite contributions made by each author, follows a very similar pattern to the works of historians organizing and analyzing various historical texts…]]>It's the turning of the final tide, the groundbreaking Blue Estate wraps issue #8, which closes the second volume of the collected editions, and launches issue #9, which opens the final volume. The stakes, and the value, couldn't be higher.
Image’s crazy pulp series Blue Estate has come full circle in the middle of its back-half of issues. What began in the series’ initial installment as part tease and part sight gag, now wraps up the comic’s out of time sequences. It also serves to underscore the point: Blue Estate is one of the best comic series this past year. We’re moving forward with Blue Estate issues eight and nine. Bruce Maddox is dead, his…]]>These stories are told with thick, evocative language that speaks of viscera and flowers and poetry and violence, from times distant and more recent, ringing individual and unique.
The Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- The literary landscape is jammed with short stories. MFA programs teach them, and authors hone their skills writing them, while publishers generally steer clear of them because, they say, nobody buys them. It’s a glut: There are so many of them, stories that are not-so-bad or pretty-good. Few authors rise above to be seen as truly excellent; at her best, Melissa Pritchard belongs in that number. What sets her apart is the voice — voices,…]]>Michael Lewis explores the global economic crisis through the eyes of a financial disaster tourist -- and brings back a collection of exotic stereotypes about the people and places that he visited.
As I write these words, world leaders from the public and private sectors are convened in Davos, Switzerland for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. The current state of the global economy casts an ominous shadow over the gathering as the International Monetary Fund’s recently released World Economic Outlook predicts slower than expected growth and anxiety over the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis finds little promise of relief. All eyes in Davos are on…]]>Ian Rankin's dialogue rings true; a sense of life as actually lived, and the lessons to be learned — or not — from history, all framed in an engrossing story never told hurriedly, but always well-paced.
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT) -- The Impossible Dead is Ian Rankin’s second Edinburgh police procedural to feature Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, the stubbornly persistent successor to John Rebus, the stubbornly persistent hero of 17 previous highly evocative Rankin crime novels, including 2007’s series-closing Exit Music. Fox made his entrance in 2009’s The Complaints, which introduced the fair-minded protagonist as the head of a three-man unit in the Complaints & Conducts division of the Scottish Lothian & Borders police force. At…]]>This book reveals Stanley Ann to be an intellectually curious, passionate, idealistic, and unconventional woman whose sense of wonder and love shaped the lives of two children -- including the one that would become the 44th president of the United States.
When Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, and the press first began to take notice of the budding lawyer and politician, there wasn't much said about his parents. If mentioned at all, the spotlight was focused steadily on Obama's Kenyan father -- a man who didn't raise Barack, but who nonetheless influenced his sense of ideals and identity as a black man in America. Following the…]]>I'm sure the smile used by Becky Cloonan to signal her enjoyment is a perfectly good smile. But the smile she draws on Conan is sublime. It opens the character in a way very few writers have been capable of.
It must be a perfectly wonderful smile, the smile saved for friends and good times, the smile Becky Cloonan uses to signal her enjoyment. But the smile Becky's drawn on Conan in the first part of "Queen of the Black Coast", is sublime. It simply is the act of standing in a cathedral, built to something far greater than ourselves. The problem of Conan, the problem that makes the character so finely-tuned for finding the…]]>The thread Sally Bedell Smith follows is how the monarchy has had to embrace its own Darwinian version of flexibility; never ahead of the times but also trying not to be fatally far behind them.
Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- Sure, why not. Let’s have yet another biography of Elizabeth II, this one as she’s about to mark 60 years on the throne. So what is new to justify Sally Bedell Smith’s massive Elizabeth the Queen? What is left to uncover, and what should be left uncovered and unknown in the life of this exemplary lady whose predetermined existence of regal obligation is yawningly unenviable, however bejeweled the box it comes in? Smith’s book answers…]]>Two neuroscientists show how magicians exploit our brains' cognitive process to fool us.
Until the invention of the MRI machine, which allowed scientists to monitor neurological behavior on a second-by-second basis, psychologists treated the brain like a black box, using lab experiments and field research to deduce the cognitive principles behind human reasoning. But, as Stephen L. Macknick and Susana Martinez-Conde, a married pair of neuroscientists, write in Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions, in many ways, the best psychological experiments…]]>Action #6's "When Superman Learned to Fly" reminds us poignantly that the superhero's struggle is never against their inner demons, but a never-ending battle to overcome the siren's call of mediocrity.
Think back far enough and you'll remember Heroes. Before Twitter, before FaceBook, the breakout NBC drama was its own kind of phenomenon. The story of a small group of people unknowingly cobbling together a future that ostensibly gifts them with strange genetic powers, Heroes was simply magical. But more than just the lionizing of that handful of humans taking its first steps, into a bigger simpler, world, Heroes is a technical achievement. The show's mastery…]]>In 1982, with the charts ruled by “Physical”, “Don’t You Want Me” and “Eye of the Tiger”, along came a low-tech record about killers, small-time thieves and other forgotten souls -- and it's still one of the best albums in American music.
I was sent David Burke’s thorough and incisive new book, Heart of Darkness, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, and was reminded that March is the 30th Anniversary of the release of Nebraska, so I figured that’s as good an excuse as any to muse on about one of the most extraordinarily brave records ever released by a major artist and the happenstance that helped bring it to creation. A little context. In the late fall of 1981,…]]>In Koonchung Chan's landscape, government doesn’t need to suppress unpleasant history; we do it ourselves, every day, simply by not paying close enough attention to the facts at hand.
Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- I’ve long been partial to E.M. Forster’s formulation that the role of fiction — or one of them, anyway — is to suggest a “buzz of implication”, a flavor of time and place more nuanced than history allows. That’s because fiction is an art of narrative, of emotion, defined by the singular movements of individuals as they navigate specific corners of the world. “One of the great pleasures of the (novel),” Jane Smiley has written,…]]>When Hunter S. Thompson began writing for Rolling Stone magazine, he had already developed his distinct voice and highly recognizable style, but at Rolling Stone, he perfected it.
"So much for objective journalism. Don't bother to look for it here—not under any byline of mine; or anyone else I can think of. With the possible exception of things like box scores, race results, and stock market tabulations, there is no such thing as Objective Journalism. The phrase itself is a gross contradiction in terms." -- The Campaign Trail: The Million-Pound Shithammer, 3 February 1972 By the time Hunter S. Thompson began writing for…]]>It's been our longest interview for an exclusive yet, Editor John Ficarra, the mind behind MAD. And it ends in the most unexpected place; compassion.
4am isn't even an idea yet. But I'm up, I'm up. Tom Waits drones out in a part of the house that is safe enough and distant enough to not wake She Who Gently Snores. It's a vain prayer for "hair-of-the-dog". A hope that by actually playing "Little Drop of Poison" out loud the song will no longer loop on the iPod of my mind. To no avail thus far. Shakespeare arcs across neurons, "If…]]>In imagining he has the right to kill another so that he can single-handedly change history, how different is Jake from the fanatical Oswald, who killed Kennedy to bolster his customized view of the world?
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) -- “How many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas?” wonders Jake Epping, narrator of Stephen King’s 11/22/63. “A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand.” Undeterred, King has written a big, page-turning novel that explores the events culminating in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination through the eyes of Jake, a 35-year-old high schoolteacher from 2011 Maine able to travel back through time — and potentially…]]>A series of poetic meditations on "the madness of puppets", this brief but dense book fascinates as much as its uncanny subject matter.
This unusual little book explores the idea of puppetry, beginning with a visit to a master puppet maker in a small studio in Rome, and ranging far and wide to include Balinese shadow puppets, Punch and Judy shows, literary puppets in the works of writers like Kafka, Dickens, Rilke and Philip Roth, and puppets as works of art in themselves, exemplified in classic pieces from Paul Klee and Joseph Cornell. Over 11 short chapters, less…]]>The new series from writer Jay Faerber explores the path of a hitman named Markham, who takes a bullet and experiences the afterlife -- or something like it -- when his heart stops on the operating table.
The gun-wielding thug at the center of Near Death is a bit more complex than your average degenerate who has found his way to "the light". The new, creator-owned Image series from writer Jay Faerber explores the path of a hitman named Markham, who takes a bullet and experiences the afterlife -- or something like it -- when his heart stops on the operating table. From there, we're asked to sympathize with a guy who…]]>You can't possibly expect to write a book called Lobster Johnson and push the Lobster to the very edge of the very first issue can you? I mean that wouldn't work, would it? And therein lies the genius of Mike Mignola.
By page three of Lobster Johnson: the Iron Prometheus, the Lobster's first solo adventure (if you don't count that 10-page backup story, "The Killer in my Skull"), the craziness was already well out of the bottle. It was only the first issue of but already a yeti trained for assassination had walked in the door of a reasonably comfortable 1937 Tribeca apartment. Not with all that manic, zany energy that Kramer usually burst into Jerry's…]]>Hollow Earth isn’t just any book. It may be the Next Big Thing in young adult (YA) literature. It’s cover proclaims that “Imagination can be a dangerous thing,” but fans of John and Carole E. Barrowman are more than willing to take that risk.
Carole Barrowman admitted on Facebook that she squealed when she saw the cover of her first young adult novel, Hollow Earth. Many first-time novelists might have a similar reaction, but Carole is not your typical author. Her previous non-fiction books have made best seller lists. Plus, her co-author (and brother) is entertainer John Barrowman. If anyone should be used to the spotlight or even blasé about success, it’s these siblings. However, Hollow Earth isn’t just…]]>I'll Be There in the Morning offers an affectionate but hardly rose-colored view of Townes Van Zandt and his influence on other songwriters.
The 1st of January 2012 marked the 15th anniversary of singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt's death. By most accounts, Van Zandt's final days were hard ones, as his years of substance abuse wore him down before exacting their final price. Unsurprisingly, this only added to the legend of Van Zandt, even though he was already regarded as one of the best songwriters to ever come out of Texas. Like Hank Williams before him (who also died…]]>The most important five years in popular music -- including the birth and rise of CBGB, the birth of disco and hip-hop, Philip Glass’s emergence as a Serious Composer, and the many shades of salsa -- in one volume.
The title isn’t hyperbole. Like the book itself, it’s poetry. Will Hermes, a senior critic with Rolling Stone and long time All Things Considered contributor, takes us on a journey through what was alternately one of the bleakest and brightest moments in New York City history. In the early ‘70s NYC teetered on bankruptcy, crime had reached proportions that can best be described as frightening, and the hellish urban decay hounds gorged themselves on the…]]>Legal activist Connie Rice has a big, important story to tell: of her passion, her history, her legal record and her connection to both the powerful and the underprivileged in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- Connie Rice is known in Los Angeles as a brilliant civil rights advocate and agitator, but people farther afield have often confused her with Condi, the former secretary of State. Connie narrowly escaped being Condoleezza, a family name; the two Rices are second cousins (and hold disparate political beliefs). Connie Rice dispenses with any confusion in the first pages of her memoir Power Concedes Nothing so she can get down to the business of telling…]]>Beginning this week, a series of prequel chapters that introduce Brian Wood's The Massive, a series that really denotes a turn in the river for this phenomenal artist.
Post-apocalyptic literature never wavers from exposing the harsh consequences of actions. Environmental disasters, biological pandemics, economic collapse, nuclear armageddon – there’s a massive list of phrases to describe what can be the horrors of cause and effect. After six years of DMZ, writer Brian Wood is no stranger to stories about strife and its aftermath. Now the Vertigo superstar creator is set to launch another such tale, The Massive, for Dark Horse Comics, but this…]]>Through two World Wars, Chanel survived it all. That’s because, as Lisa Chaney puts it so well, Chanel owned the zeitgeist.
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT) -- Women’s wardrobes would be oh-so-cumbersome, not to mention boring, without the contributions of the great Parisian designer Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel. Chanel gave us the little black dress, gaudy layers of pearls, and the fitted tweed suit. Most important, she popularized predecessor Paul Poiret’s early-1900s frocks that featured straighter silhouettes and shorter hemlines. These boyish pieces ultimately helped women do away with the corset. That’s common fashionista knowledge. But there’s much more that hasn’t been common…]]>When you read about the medieval mania for buggery and the Victorian craze for flagellation, it’s difficult not to feel a blushing fascination for our forebears and their proclivities.
From the shivering slaves on the docks of Romano-British Londinium to the Cheapside tarts of the 18th century; and onwards to poor slaughtered Mary Kelly (the last known victim of Jack the Ripper in the 1880s) in Miller’s Court and ending with the good-time girls of the Swinging ’60s Soho, controlled by sinister organised crime bosses and pimps: ‘Plus Ça Change …’ Catharine Arnold concludes in her final chapter: ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la…]]>Before Grant Morrison's JLA, the creative challenge for any Justice League writer was the overpowered Superman. With JLA Batman became the writer's peril. But with Justice League #5 Geoff Johns introduces a new kind of creative danger.
Were the original creators of the very first Justice League scared of Superman? Decades later with Justice League International, the Justice League incarnation that spanned the 80s-90s and loosely chronicled the emerging post-Soviet world, the creators certainly appeared to be. Justice League International simply wrote Superman out of the League, as did the book Wonder Woman. And there's little reason to blame them. Superman is definitely a problem. He's simply too powerful. He bend steel…]]>Ha Jin leaves us with the memory of good work, people saving lives and the worth of reaching out, even when death and despair prevail.
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT) -- The Rape of Nanjing is foreground and backdrop of Ha Jin’s novel Nanjing Requiem. A fictionalized yet faithful portrayal of events during that nightmare time, Nanjing Requiem is two tragedies in one, a vast tragedy for the human race and a terrible misfortune for a good person, repaid for selflessness with disregard and mental breakdown. Despite the screams of pain and chatter of machine guns, despite the clash and conflict, Nanjing Requiem remains muted in…]]>While it's disappointing to see that Daphne du Maurier wasn't always so capable with the art of fiction as she later became, it's refreshing to be reminded that even great writers have to start somewhere.
Comprised of short stories originally published mostly in the early '30s, The Doll: The Lost Short Stories showcases the short fiction of a young Daphne du Maurier. Written before she garnered fame for such works as Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, and The Birds, these stories reveal a young woman struggling to grasp concepts such as well-developed characters, dynamic plotlines, and moving language. Partly owing to her youth and partly to her contemporary literary convention, the stories…]]>After a philosophical split with Cyclops over care for the next generation of mutants, Wolverine returns to upstate New York, to the roots of the X-Men to rebuild the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning.
By this summer it will be three summers back now, Jason Aaron's flawless, meticulous first arc on Wolverine: Weapon X. The shift in the Marvel universe (Earth-616) had kept track perfectly, of the mood of the moment. Psychic devastation at the global financial crisis of 2008 was mirrored in Marvel's "Dark Reign" books. After their failure to defeat the Secret Invasion, heroes were systematically being removed from their own titles. And impostors, villains parading as…]]>Every page of this fat, addictive, ridiculously entertaining book, which covers the rise and fall of MTV from 1981-1992, is overstuffed with anecdotes.
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) -- Some of the fun facts recounted in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Revolution: -- When an Epic Records executive started showing a video from a new group called Culture Club for the song “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?,” everyone who watched it said, “Man, she’s really ugly.” -- On the shoot of the first video for The Police’s “Synchronicity” album, lead singer Sting told the director, “Just keep…]]>Marty Halpern’s editorial brief was for writers to concoct their narratives around first encounters with aliens and, duly noted, numerous authors are represented here with perfectly tailored schemes.
There's quite a lot of contact in these stories; with many and various life-forms. A recurring feature seems to be hair that grows in snake-like tendrils and has a life of its own. More than one of the authors here seems to delight in that Medusa-like image. And there's a powerful embedding of mythic motifs and Eden-like imaginings throughout these stories. Marty Halpern’s editorial brief was for writers to concoct their narratives around first encounters…]]>Eva is by nature a dark realist. She tries to understand what drives her inscrutable child, and can only think he resents the very fact of being alive.
Thirty-seven-year old Eva Khatchadourian has it all—a thriving business writing travel guides, money, a loft in New York City, and her husband, Franklin Plaskett. The couple live the free and easy life afforded by money and location until, as middle age creeps up, they begin to discuss whether or not to have a child. To describe Eva as ambivalent understates the case. She is riddled with doubts. Franklin, her opposite in so many things, would…]]>It's especially hard to shift between being a world-class media theorist writing nonfiction, and a writer of fiction. That's even more so when the fiction appears as comics. Why does Douglas Rushkoff make it look so easy?
It's hard not to trust Douglas Rushkoff immediately from just speaking to him. He's polite, unassuming, affable. And one of the secret architects of the kind of criticism that is now shifting to the core of interpreting our progressive easing into digital culture. The interview begins with my almost Stockholm-Syndromed awe. One of the most rewarding aspects of the interview however, is the ease with which Douglas is able to return to the ideas themselves.…]]>War is a science, science is an art and art, as Library After Air Raid attests, is everything.
In June of 2011, I purchased a postcard reproduction of Library After Air Raid (London 1940) (depiction, following page) at Vroman’s Books in Pasadena, California, and for the duration of that year, 12 months that were as hellish and chaotic for me as the events memorialized in the anonymous photographer’s lens from 1940, that postcard was always within arm’s reach; sometimes I employed it as a book mark for books I never finished reading. When…]]>The former U.S. Secretary of State gives a respectful, mostly diplomatic, and meticulously thorough account of her years in Washington.
You know the feeling you get right after an accident? The moment after the laptop slips from your hands or your car scrapes another vehicle and you cringe, it's hard not to wonder, "How could that have happened?" There's an instant of shock, and then frustration and regret. Even if the result is just minor property damage or lost funds, accidents can be maddening. And if our missteps cause harm to another living being, well…]]>Clare Tomalin's timely biography focuses on how the man who wrote both heroes and villains so well found elements of both in himself.
In the last chapter of her biography, Claire Tomalin speaks of one of Dickens' earliest biographers: his daughter, Katey (Kate Perugini). "Katey spoke out," Tomalin tells us, "as no one had done before, mixing love and anger, but clear in what she said." Tomalin speaks in voices of both love and anger, but for the most part, succeeds in narrating a clear-eyed view of a man whose great fault was that almost no one in…]]>