Be Not Afraid
Between rescuing Joaquin Phoenix from a car wreck and dodging bullets during an interview, German director Werner Herzog leads a dramatic life. According to his private diaries, we shouldn’t be surprised.
Rosecrans Baldwin
Me Write Book
It’s not easy being the world’s favorite frigid hominid, especially when your existential problems are worse than most college sophomores’. Me Write Book, It Bigfoot Memoir, by TMN favorite Graham Roumieu, is a very funny and wonderfully illustrated little book, reminiscent of The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp
A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts puts you in an 18-year-old’s hobnailed boots as he hikes across Europe in 1933 and takes scrupulous, even luscious, notes of his trip. I’m hard-pressed to pick better travel writing than this: Well documented, personal and enthusiastic,
Mondovino
Mondovino comes with a caveat: it’s endless, meandering, filmed with herky-jerky handling (to the point of making me nauseated), obsessed with industry celebrities, and at times so confusing (including the horribly designed subtitles) you double-check your remote in case there’s an “Appendix” button. But it’s
Auld Lang Syne
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we offer ways to avoid being kissless on New Year’s Eve.
Uncivil Seasons
When people ask me for a book recommendation, wanting a good page-turner, I love to push Michael Malone’s Uncivil Seasons. It’s the opening segment in his Justin and Cuddy trilogy about two oddly matched detectives in North Carolina, and Malone produces a very rich reality to get
What Your Christmas Tree Says About You
Experts answer what they know. The Non-Expert answers anything. This week we address the great American class divider: Are your tree lights white or colored, or even (gasp) blinking?
Thinking of You
Friend of TMN Sam Brown has been making weird, witty, touching drawings for the last five years at Exploding Dog—each drawing inspired by a sentence submitted by a reader—and just in time for the holidays, he’s released a book, Thinking of You, with more than 140 drawings
Edible San Francisco
New Yorkers like me believe we’ve got it the best among cities when it comes to dining out, but sadly there’s no Big Apple comparison to Edible San Francisco, a homespun, food-nerdy journal for eaters in the Bay Area. Editor Bruce Cole has done a nice job
Love Trouble
Students of Ian Frazier, fetch your Visas! How many young writers, humor lovers, Tina Brown haters have heard of Veronica Geng? If only for her piece “Love Trouble Is My Business”—a detective story made of sentences containing the phrases “Mr. Reagan” and “read Proust”—her book Love Trouble, a