Allow me to speculate that if you found your way to this space and stayed on, that you are in no danger of wasting your time reading the latest product of failed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's ambition--her number-one bestselling whatchamacallit, Going Rogue. Though I think
As the father of an 11-year-old boy, I am ever vigilant for books and other reading materials with which to influence him. Thus, I find my way into areas of the book world that are slightly off-track for me. Which is how I chanced to discover illustrator/
Typically, sports biographies fall into two categories of uselessness: takedowns (e.g., A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez) or tell-alls (Jose Canseco's Juiced). However, recently there have been a few that break those predictable, banal parameters--either because of the subject or the story or
Speaking of the incomparable Gore Vidal, his newest book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (Abrams Books) is, if you treasure this sort of thing (which I do), an amazing memoir (more than 500 images) rendered with a variety of artifacts--photographs, letters, manuscripts--from his archives and
(Photo by Robert Birnbaum) Old pal and Hunter College mentor Colum McCann , author of Dancer and Zoli won the National Book Award for fiction for his exuberant recent opus Let the Great World Spin. Which at the least means future editions of the book will have shiny stickers disquieting the
J.C. Hallman, editor of an inspired anthology, The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (Tin House), has already exhibited a commendable ambidexterity with his nonfiction (soon to be a useless descriptor) tome The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe, a companionable investigation
Novelist Philip Caputo (Acts of Faith, A Rumor of War) skillfully interweaves the post-9/11 reality of drug cartels and immigrant hordes with the early 20th-century world of the Mexican-U.S. border in a multigenerational tale. The lives of a grieving widower, an illegal Mexican alien, and
Though mayhem, war, mass murder, civil unrest, homicidal acts of God (known as natural disasters), famine, plague, and genocide seem to be growth industries, the population of brave men and women (naysayers may say "thrill-seeking adrenaline junkies") who report the news (before service journalism infected a once-
Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review--the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s--since they have dropped the hyperbolic "DNA of literature" slogan, I am pleased to pass on the
As long as I am banging the drum for short fiction, let me apprise you of the latest addition to the Akashic Books Noir Series: Boston Noir edited by Boston homeboy Dennis Lehane (The Given Day). Since the 2004 publication of Brooklyn Noir, that series has added some 30 titles,
