January 2010 Archives
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New Finds
Whom Do You Trust?
Nick Tosches’s restless curiosity trods a wide literary terrain, and his formidable talents cross boundaries and barriers that might restrain lesser minds. He has written extraordinary (and perhaps definitive)...
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Current Reads
The Mysteries of Mississippi
Mississipian Steve Yarbrough’s Prisoners of War is a novel to which I regularly make reference as one that is vastly underappreciated—though now having read four of his novels,...
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The Non-Expert
Terribly Happy
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we use some recent knowledge of severance packages to help one of the newly unemployed.
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Rare Medium
The People’s Historian
As you probably have read at this site and many other venues, my valued mentor and dear friend Howard Zinn has passed away. It is some small evidence of his...
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Op-Ed
Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
A swear-laden review of some glorious cursing in pop music.
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Coffee Table Gallery
Who Shot Rock?
Photography historian and curator Gail Buckland, whose The Magic Image (with Cecil Beaton) is a seminal history of photography and one of her dozen highly regarded books on photography, adds...
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Serious Fun
Before the Fall
Chicago-born writer John McNally (America’s Report Card, The Book of Ralph, The Ghosts of Chicago), who teaches at Wake Forest University and thankfully has not gone native by embellishing...
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Of Recent Note
Cures for the Common Cold
As we spelunk into the depths of winter, we felt the time was ripe to rearm our medicine cabinets. Our staff and readers share their remedies for colds, flus, and related maladies.
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Rare Medium
A Thoughtful View
Last week I had a pleasant and stimulating conversation with Nick Flynn whose new book made mention of and was influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting...
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Back in the Day
The Dustbin of History
That portion of the human community that self-assigns itself the task of reminding all of us the lowly values of the human species and regularly intones and scolds “I told...
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The Golem Blog
Moving Ground
When there are heavy tolls on human life, there are questions of faith. Some turn to it; others blame it. The Golem has seen this happen before.
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The New Pantheon
Best European Fiction
Dismissing the misplaced use of the superlative in the title, this first anthology of European fiction (which proposes to be annual) depends for its credibility on its editor, Sarajevo-born Aleksandar...
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Current Reads
The Good Shepard
In baseball lingo, Sam Shepard is at least a four-tool talent—writer, playwright, screenwriter (Paris, Texas), and actor. As an actor Shepard has made valuable contributions to some memorable films ...
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Gallery
Compulsive Knitting
Three years ago, Daniela Edburg’s highly stylized photos of women dead from consumption of sweets and snack foods brought humor to classic portraiture and film noir.
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New Finds
Big Troubles
In military and diplomatic circles small wars are operations undertaken under executive authority within certain parameters. In the case of my insights and perambulations for this day, Small Wars (Harper...
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Serious Fun
Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out Redux
Don Lattin (Jesus Freaks), who for years covered religion for San Francisco newspapers, has a new book: The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew...
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Profiles
Dead of State
Where politics and democracy fail, nature eventually wins. A number of tyrants and world leaders are currently sick. Ranking the illest.
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Interview
Star Black
Star Black is a poet, photographer, and collage artist living and working in New York City. She’s released five books of poems, has taught at The New School and...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Ask Not for Whom the Bomb Ticks
Writer, poet, and University of Houston mentor Nick Flynn received well-deserved attention and commendations for the first installment of his memoirs, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, which chronicled a...
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Reader Letters
Literary Flip-Flops
I’m a great fan of your Tournament and I follow it assiduously each year. This year you note that at least one National Book Award judge “flipped” a coin...
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Current Reads
Miami Beach Exposed
Miami has certainly had a fair share of superlative chroniclers—Joan Didion’s Miami, David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Tourists, Exiles, and Refugees in the New America, among others—...
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Op-Ed
God Hearts Haiti
Gauging the invasion of the well-intentioned a week after the devastation of Port-au-Prince and wondering what it really means for Haiti’s future.
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Writing About Writers
What Are Pointy Heads Good For?
It makes sense that all those pointy-headed intellectuals (a quick search of the Internet and my claim will be confirmed) would flock around George Scialabba and his new anthology of...
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Genre Genre Genre
Down on the Border
Thomas Jefferson Parker has done well in the crime-story world, having written 16 well-received novels. The last two (LA Outlaws, The Renegades) featured LA Sheriff’s Department deputy Charlie Hood and...
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Letters From London
Spite as Snow
Britons are weather-obsessed, but they can’t manage flurries. Our man in London reports on why the U.K. won’t handle the next blizzard any better.
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Back in the Day
Eyeful in Gaza
In the United States, My Lai may still be remembered as the one recognized massacre of the Vietnam war. And the El Mozote (see Mark Danner) carnage may be recalled...
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Gallery
Hospice Behind Bars
At a Louisiana prison best known for controversial rodeos and keeping the Angola 3 in solitary confinement for more than 29 years, there’s a glimmer of hope and humanity: a hospice where inmate volunteers provide end-of-life care for dying prisoners.
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Rare Medium
Letters, We Got Letters
Thomas Mallon (Fellow Travelers) is a delightful writer. In conversation he displays a puckish sensibility, and on the page, ample good humor. With seven novels under his belt (one of...
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Announcements
What Are Your Cures for the Common Cold?
'Tis the season of the long hard slog from New Year's to March, the snow and the rain, the wintry contagions. Thank goodness for the occasional three-day weekend and flu...
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Current Reads
Killer Rubber Duckies
In their eye-opening new book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things (Counterpoint), Canadian environmental activists Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie quote from Rachel Carson’s...
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New Finds
It’s Never Too Late
Alabama-born Andre Williams migrated to Chicago with his parents only to be returned to the South when his mother died in 1943. Finding that comeback infelicitous, he made his way back...
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The Non-Expert
‘Tussin
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we assist a college student who’s swimming in dirty laundry and drowning in cough syrup.
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Back Matter
Poor Haiti
The outpouring of concern and aid for the victims of benighted Haiti’s most recent disaster is, I suppose, some measure of comfort for the victims who inhabit one of...
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Mi, Mi, Mi, Mi
Special K
Reading the New York Times editorial pages—Nobel laureate Paul Krugman specifically—one might get the idea that the ruling class (the speculators and the hoaxers, and the mandarins who...
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Serious Fun
Doing Things With Words
There are, to be sure, still people for whom the textures, subtleties, and nuances of language are of significant if not vital concern. Regular declarations of the decline of all...
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Apropos of Nothing
Treme Arriving
Tom Piazza, who has written well about New Orleans (his NOLA-based novel, City of Refuge, was the runner-up in last year’s Tournament of Books), is a member of the...
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The Rooster
The 2010 Tournament of Books
Six years and growing, this year’s Tournament of Books will debut in March. Until then, we’ve got judges, the shortlist, and your shot at picking Zombies.
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Genre Genre Genre
Sleepless in Los Angeles
Despite his early books’ preoccupation with vampiric themes (which seem to be all the rage), if you haven’t heard of or read Charlie Huston (The Mystic Arts of Erasing...
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Bookbag
Acolytes of Gutenberg
Every year end I stew in my own vexation as we’re bombarded by various cultural gatekeepers’ lists of the top/best/sexiest/favorite/hottest/most important books of the...
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Back in the Day
Founding Fathers, Sisters, and Cousins
Thankfully, due to the efforts of people like historians Howard Zinn, Sean Willentz, Ray Raphael, and others, the historical revisionism that views American history from the bottom up—so-called people’...
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Gallery
William Burroughs’s Stuff
Like estate sales or cat burglary, Peter Ross’s photographs of William Burroughs’s possessions provide a glimpse into the material world of someone we thought we knew.
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Interview
Anil Dash
Anil Dash describes himself as a “blogger, entrepreneur, and geek living in NYC.” His blog, started in 1999, was one of the first on the web. He was the first employee...
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Current Reads
A Boston Whodunnit
Boston, which has variously proclaimed itself the Athens of America and The Hub of the Universe, counts in its history a number of events well known to non-residents, most of...
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Coffee Table Gallery
Fair Fowl
I may have to amend my recent claim that I am sparing in the use of the superlative ‘amazing’ if I continue to discover books such as Andrew Zuckerman’s...
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Iconography
When Newspapers Were Newspapers
The death of the great caricaturist David Levine reminded me of another great artist, political cartoonist Herb Block (better known as Herblock). Herblock, whose career spanned 70 years and four Pulitzer...
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Birnbaum v.
Michael Ondaatje
Our man in Boston talks to Michael Ondaatje about why he writes novels, how he measures satisfaction, and when fiction can succeed by operating like poetry.
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The Non-Expert
Just Like Heaven
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we answer that eternal question: What happens after we die?
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Current Reads
Straight to the Heart
No doubt my fondness for the geography of my youth (Chicago and neighboring Big 10 states) has contributed to my sensitivity to regional chauvinism—who coined the phrase “flyover zone” anyway?...
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The Golem Blog
Marked Man
The tricky part about blogging is knowing where to draw the line about what’s revealed. After his last post raised some eyebrows, the Golem addresses the whole eating thing.
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New Finds
The Good, The Bad, The Funny
If he never published another book, music commentator and cultural historian David Hadju most certainly made his bones with Lush Life, his incomparable biography of the great Duke Ellington collaborator,...
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Little Magazines
Small But Persistent
Visitors to this (so to speak) space are aware of my fondness for periodical literature and “small” magazines in particular. One I pay attention to is Glimmertrain, a literary quarterly...
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Current Reads
Master of the Novella
Jim Harrison’s screenplays and almost 30 books, including 15 of fiction (in his own reckoning, he is first and foremost a poet, and also a wonderful food commentator) have firmly fixed...
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New York, New York
Field Notes From 89th Street
Native New Yorkers live a traditional village life: of multiple generations, friends from kindergarten, and ghosts. Taking a naturalist’s eye to a corner of the city.
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Gallery
Guardians of the Art World
Andy Freeberg’s photos of the women who oversee Russian art museums and the front-desk attendants in Chelsea galleries turn context and background into art.
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Bookbag
Readings Redux
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley is a useful and valuable commentator on books and culture, whose good work stands out in an increasingly degraded enterprise (the reviewing of books...
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Iconography
A Mighty, Mighty Pen
Last summer I had occasion to comment on caricaturist David Levine’s most recent tome collecting his assorted drawings of American presidents. Sadly, Levine succumbed to prostate cancer over the...