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Blog posts tagged with "book review"
What's Left from the End Times
| August 4, 2015 To begin her new book, Joni Tevis, the author of the equally unusual, The Wet Collection, quotes the Midwestern novelist, Sherwood Anderson, in an epigraph: “Just say in big letters, ‘The World is on Fire.’ That will make ’em look up.” So she does and so do we.
Climbing the High Ridges and Stumbling
| July 1, 2015 I should be clear: I think writing well is terribly hard work, and I admire anyone who endures it. Me, I’ve yet to publish a book of any kind, and I don’t teach writing or literature at any college or university, so maybe you’d just as soon stop reading right here. After all, I’m hardly a professional book reviewer. But because I’m a professional educator, an environmental educator, I do know this: it all comes down to creating an authentic experience.
Turning the Tables: How One Woman Put Food in Its Place
| June 10, 2015 Andie Mitchell is a “foodie.” She is a serious, hard-core “foodie,” a fact that comes through in delicious, descriptive detail on virtually every page of her 232-page memoir, It Was Me All Along.
It's About Time
| May 5, 2015 On the first page of Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso tells us that she started keeping a diary because she didn’t want to lose anything. So she wrote—800,000 words over twenty-five years. But you won’t see a word from those diaries in Ongoingness, The End of a Diary...
Where Have All the Overmedicated Mermaids Gone?
| April 6, 2015 Elissa Washuta’s memoir is a twisting, chameleon-like work of reportage, highly poetic at times, showing how cultural forces and tragic events have left their tracks on her body and mind. The search “for an identity to sink into” in a savage, selfish world is at the heart of this book.
A Son Coming Home
| March 1, 2015 Steven Harvey, in his marvelous memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, is on a journey to discover and understand his mother who committed suicide in April, 1961, when Harvey was eleven years old. Reflecting on her act, Harvey observes that it “had exploded in my life like the flash of a camera at close range, darkening everything around me and casting me into blindness, and when the light returned she was gone. . . . "
Which Way Next?
| February 1, 2015 In his brief essay, “Dead Weight,” Eric Freeze describes a walk he takes with his dog, Zeke, a walk that ends horribly. He sees a police cruiser descending a hill, his Dalmatian blundering into its path, and there’s nothing he can do but shout and witness the inevitable. This scene reveals a tension that runs through many of the fifteen essays in his first collection of essays, Hemingway on a Bike: the threat of lurking disaster in the most peaceful of moments versus the potential in such moments for sudden and wonderful insight.
A Beautiful Savage Game
| January 7, 2015 After forty years of watching the game, playing fantasy football, and mourning yet another Oakland Raiders’ loss, Almond no longer indulges his love of watching football and his latest book, Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, explains why.
The Infinitely Unending Art of Judith Kitchen
| December 1, 2014 Judith Kitchen, writer, editor, critic, and teacher, died at the age of 73 on November 6, 2014, after living with metastasized breast cancer, the subject of The Circus Train. I choose the word “living” deliberately because Kitchen’s presence—her aliveness on the page—is a swirling force behind many memorable passages in the book...
Raise High the Roof Beam, Women Authors
| November 3, 2014 Since its inception, Shebooks’ digital collection of downloadable fiction, memoir, and journalism has grown to over 70 books, each of which the publishers say can be read “in an hour or two.” Their library is composed of works by both new and established writers. We review three selections in this month's book review.
To the Body Born
| October 1, 2014 “I started my martial arts training on the day the Gulf War began,” Peggy Shinner recalls. It was a discipline she would go on to master and teach. Moving across the page in her essay collection, You Feel So Mortal, with the same agility she took to the polished wood of the dojo floor, Shinner explores the flesh and blood experience—hers and ours—of having a body.
The Nothing That Is Not There and the Nothing That Is
| September 3, 2014 In Praise of Nothing is both an interesting and a frustrating book. It’s interesting in its attempt to write a postmodern memoir. It’s frustrating, however, because it does not fulfill the reader’s conventional expectations of coherence and meaning. Postmodern thinkers, such as Roland Barthes, are highly skeptical of the idea of human agency and would also doubt the coherence of the self. They believe the idea that a human being who is a psychologically whole and stable person is largely fictionalized. Therefore, LeMay has written an unstable memoir.
Essaying a Spinning World
| August 1, 2014 Much of what Skloot deems "off-kilter" seems the kind of emotional imbalance with which we can all identify.
The Inner World of Caregiving
| July 1, 2014 If caregiving was a compass and sainthood was at zero degrees north, The Fifth Season would orient us due south.
Growing the Soil and the Soul: On Richard Gilbert's SHEPHERD
| June 1, 2014 Sometimes a memoir, spilling into the ken of autobiography, must grapple with an author’s lifelong enigma—his book’s story, the story. As we read, we feel this cyclonic summing-up, the best chance after the life (or as far as the life has got) to say what, in particular, shaped that life’s core meaning. Perhaps the revelation is that we don’t get another go-round (obvious but important), that we never knew the storm was gathering while it happened (as much good as bad), and that the life we thought we lived was not exactly the one we did live (the new self the memoir discloses to its surprised narrator). Such is the case with Richard Gilbert’s book, Shepherd.
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