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Blog posts tagged with "book review"
Art and National Identity
| May 2, 2018 As her title confirms, Vigderman’s primary concern is the Parthenon. The history she offers of this culturally significant site is enlightening.
Houses of Injury and Healing
| April 1, 2018 As the curator of Beautiful Flesh, G'Schwind’s self-proclaimed mission is "to create a body" that weaves individual stories together, forming a larger narrative.
Keywords: book review
The Heart He Hearts Aching Inside Him
| March 7, 2018 A hybrid of poetry and prose, Lemon’s Feverland reads nothing like a chronological narrative. Rather, it’s a fully choreographed set of movements that, in their abrupt turns, mimic the abrupt moments, episodes, and periods of Lemon’s life.
Of Poets, Police Dogs, and Their Handlers
| February 6, 2018 In a journey through four countries, pursuing canine law enforcement units and their stories, Rose delivers a multi-faceted immersion memoir: observations, interviews, analysis, criticisms, and praise of how different nations approach policing with and without dogs.
Keywords: book review, rachel rose
The Country Cousin to Love
| January 9, 2018 When a friend of Kate Carroll de Gutes remarked about how often the positive aspects of others' lives are mentioned on Facebook, as opposed to the negative, de Gutes, in the essayist's quintessential way, got to thinking. What her musings sparked is The Authenticity Experiment...
Keywords: book review, kate carroll de gutes
Slim & Sublime
| December 1, 2017 In On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, William Zinsser extols the memoir form: "For me, no other nonfiction form goes so deeply to the roots of personal experience--to all the drama and pain and humor and unexpectedness of life."
The Dead Baby Lives
| November 9, 2017 Jennifer Sinor's birth, which is anything but ordinary, sets up the thematic trajectory of Ordinary Trauma, a coming-of-age memoir that doubles as a father-daughter story...
Words and Their Users: Wrestling with John D'Agata's Canonry
| October 4, 2017 I suppose it was inevitable. The age of self-disclosure-memoir writing, celebrity tweets, one-person Broadway shows, jihadist pre-bomb goodbye videos-would give way to one editor's need to order up a new hegemony for that intractable thing we call the essay...
Keywords: a new history of the essay, book review
The Art of Voids
| September 1, 2017 Sinor apprentices herself to O'Keeffe’s artistry. By doing so, Sinor examines the reaches of art itself, what art does, or what art should do. She pushes the stories onto the page as O'Keeffe "pushed paint on the canvas"...
Keywords: book review, jennifer sinor
What Also Matters? The Voices of Women of Color.
| August 7, 2017 The Crunk Feminist Collection is a much-needed anthology of short essays written by black women and women of color. Its narratives center on race, gender, pop culture and current events. The collection blends writers who specialize in personal anecdote with razor-sharp critique and who employ a conversational tone as complex issues are carefully dissected and taken to task.
Must Hard Stories Be So Hard?
| July 1, 2017 Book Review of Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by N. West Moss
Happier Than He Has Any Right to Feel
| June 1, 2017 It may seem a foregone conclusion that Should I Still Wish, by John Evans, would make worthwhile reading. Evans is a Stanford University lecturer, memoirist, and winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for Young Widower: A Memoir, in 2014. His writing has set him apart. What is not unique, however, is the subject of this memoir: death. Unfortunately, just about everyone has the misfortune of knowing and loving someone who has died or is dying, and more than a few of us have been compelled to write about our experiences. It’s an arguably over-worn subject, but Evans’s story doesn’t disappear into the middle of the pack.
One Era Ends. Another Begins.
| May 5, 2017 When the past doesn’t suit you, from what do you build the future? It’s a question that lumps at the throats of many twenty-somethings who know their lives will not follow those of their parents. Though Leslie Lawrence is well past her twenties, she uses the same question to animate her book of essays, The Death of Fred Astaire, an eclectic collection that ranges over decades of its author’s unexpected life.
The Kingdom of the Sick
| April 7, 2017 My best childhood friend, Vanessa, suffers from debilitating chronic pain. She has seen multiple specialists, tried numerous treatments, and been diagnosed with a handful of conditions, all of which perhaps come close to naming her experience, but never fully...
A Life Story, Buried and Unburied
| March 2, 2017 I seek out some nonfiction knowing I will find the author's train of mind as compelling as his subject. This was certainly true with John Edgar Wideman's latest book, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File.
Why We Need Literature More Than Ever
| February 7, 2017 Flesh and Stones: Field Notes from a Finite World by Jan Shoemaker
Keywords: book review
Stitched Together
| January 13, 2017 Body Memory is comprised of five, intimately connected essays. All of the essays, together, weave a story, simultaneously sad and expectant, of a man bereft.
Keywords: book review
A Craft He Would, Thankfully, Never Learn
| December 8, 2016 In the 1970s and 1980s, freshman composition was a province of nonfiction writing. In those days, teachers who taught comp--myself among them--learned our craft largely from the primers of people like Peter Elbow, Toby Fulwiler, Wendy Bishop, and Donald Murray, four of that period's more formidable, most passionate teacher-writers...
Growing Up With Doomsday
| November 1, 2016 Memoir, in the hands of its best practitioners, enables readers to enter a world quite different from their own--and find common ground. No writer does this better than Jerald Walker, author of The World in Flames, A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult.
Keywords: book review
True Grits
| October 6, 2016 Harry Crews begins his classic memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by conjuring in intimate detail someone he doesn't remember...
The Importance of Being Outside
| September 1, 2016 Gail Folkins' collection of essays was just the impetus I needed to unearth our family's old camping equipment and plan a trip into the mountains. We hadn't gone backpacking since before our son was born, and as I sifted through stuff sacks, headlamps, and cookware, neglected parts of myself reawakened...
For You, the Universe on a String
| August 12, 2016 Whenever I hear someone has writer's block, I recommend writing about one's parents. It's a loaded subject for anyone, conjuring feelings we might otherwise repress...
Thought Paths
| July 1, 2016 "Spit" is Patrick Madden's lead essay in his latest collection, Sublime Physick. The next eleven pieces (seven previously published) shift from forceful ejection of saliva to empathy, recognition, physics, and elevators. Three compositions focus on lost children. Cave paintings, Tarot cards, time, voyages--these subjects, too, with a little music and mortality thrown in plus photos and illustrations. Male zipper negligence? Why not?! The topics range far and wide, proving no theme is off limits for this wordsmith.
The Uncomfortable Place Between Vulnerability and Voyeurism
| June 14, 2016 B.J. Hollars means it when he says, "This is a test." He tests us from the opening essay when he puts us in the middle of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. More specifically, he puts us in a bathtub in the middle of a tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We huddle there with Hollars, his pregnant wife and his dog. All: vulnerable...
The Sincerest Form of Flattery
| May 2, 2016 The essayists in After Montaigne react to a particular one of the Essays. Our review examines the book as a whole and discusses the work therein by E.J. Levy, Lia Purpura, Mary Cappello, Wayne Koestenbaum, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Nicole Walker, Steven Church, Robert Atwan, Chris Arthur, Elena Passarello, Maggie Nelson, and Philip Lopate.
Faith, Fear, and Fractals
| April 8, 2016 I want to hook you by claiming that William Bradley's book of essays, Fractals, is about his near fatal battle with Hodgkin's Disease in his early twenties. And it is... But the book is also much more...
Out of Sight
| March 1, 2016 A wizard behind the U.S. space program, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, once likened space missions to the ocean voyages of ancient mariners. The analogy seems perfect, but the sea, while harsh, isn't instantly fatal to shipwrecked sailors.
Legacy of Lobotomy
| February 4, 2016 Janet Sternburg grew up in a tight-knit, lower-middle-class Jewish family, in Boston, the niece of a lobotomised uncle and aunt.
Each and Both
January 19, 2016 Garth Evans and Leila Philip's Water Rising calls to mind the way Merce Cunningham and John Cage worked side by side while living together as life partners. Cunningham and Cage joined dance and music by intentional collaborative chance. How do you produce a work of art that exists in two minds and media yet is created independently and concurrently? Somehow, Garth Evans and Leila Philip, who are married, have done this -- and more.
Keywords: book review, each and both, garth evans, leila philip, water rising |
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A Wildly Funny Life Story -- I, Too, Admire Your Shoes!
| December 1, 2015 "I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation," wrote Flaubert to his friend Mademoiselle Leroyer in 1864, talking of what would become his semi-autobiographical novel, Sentimental Education....Substitute women for men, memoir for novel, feminism for nineteenth-century bohemianism, and place our young-to-middle-aged protagonist in a green miniskirt in a Sun Belt college town. There you have, more or less, the themes and plot of Debra Monroe's new memoir, My Unsentimental Education, which updates Flaubert's novel for our own suburban, gender-redefining times.
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