Ana Menéndez, (Loving Che) a former columnist/reporter for the Miami Herald has written, variously, about Cuba, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Istanbul, and India, her base for three years. With her new opus, The Last War (HarperCollins), she has authored two novels (in addition to a story collection). Set in Istanbul, The
Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I was not aware of this sprawling prairie city's commitment to racial segregation until Martin Luther King came to the city and led marches for fair (desegregated) housing in Caucasian neighborhoods. For such temerity, the good doctor
Ginnah Howard (Rope & Bone) manages to make the harrowing and bitter world of a shattered family (suicide of the father and one brother and the perennial cycle of substance abuse and various rehabilitations of the remaining brother) convincingly interesting. Set in upstate New York, the story alternates between Mark-
The Scott Dadich-designed Periodical Photographs (Aperture) by award-winning editorial photographer Dan Winters collects and features 90 full-color images (some of which have appeared in New York, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times Magazine), including such diverse subjects as Gwyneth Paltrow, Denzel Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono,
If you need a reminder of how degraded, sycophantic, lazy, smug, boring, and predictable contemporary journalism has become, San Francisco State University mentor Peter Richardson's (American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams) A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed
The Kennedy crime family seems to have been the first to come up with the bright idea to import its ill-gotten (remember patriarch Joe was, among other things, a bootlegger) gains into legitimate and semi-legitimate (movies and later, politics) businesses. Thus, the crimes associated with the Kennedys'
Having recently noted Rebecca Solnit's encouraging study of community responses to disasters (like Hurricane Katrina), I also availed myself of an opportunity to chat with Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), whose new book, Strength in What Remains (Random House), vividly and honestly chronicles the truly extraordinary ordeal of
Since I don't go out much I can't tell if there is a lot of hoopla around the publication of the Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors-edited A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press) --although I do take exception to a use of "
Given the prodigious and intense scholarship devoted to all manner of subjects--central and tangential--to the Holocaust (or "Shoah" as some Jews prefer to call it), it is an encouraging sign that new information or new ways of looking at what we know are still being unearthed.
As an expatriate Chicagoan trapped in the cosmic psyche experiment of the East Coast, I am loathe to appreciate the ongoing, relentless celebration of New York City as the center of the universe (or to extend Jim Harrison's acute appraisal, the ultimate center of ambition). Happily, German illustrator
