Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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...