Just what the world needed, another award and another award show. Denis Loy Johnson, of Melville House Publishing, who is a shrewd and savvy fellow and outspoken journalist (and who I first came across when he put out a very useful website called Moby Lives, and who shared my antipathy
To tell the truth, I find many books on reading far too precious. I mean why do I want to read about reading when I can just read?—which I have been doing with gusto most of my life (except for a brief caesura to partake in the exuberance of
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 year. The meaninglessness of this enterprise occasionally hits critical mass when some media genius becomes enamored with the—for lack
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 in some few hundred words for newspapers). Since February 2003, he has been devoting an occasional column to, as he
Forgive my temporary amnesia but I cannot recall what caused the heightened awareness of Latin American literature resulting in the so-called Latin American Boom of the '60s and '70s (both the rubric and the fact attached to it)--the conventional wisdom holding that it was the confluence of
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
By now if you have any interest in American history or Abraham Lincoln, you are aware that 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of his birth, and naturally there is a gush of books adding to the already voluminous Lincoln bibliography. I have already dealt with a few of these tomes
If there is a blacker mark of shame on the history of American governance (the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans notwithstanding), I am open to considering it. (Local so-called riots--Tulsa, Rosewood--don't qualify as they did not have federal government complicity.) The fact that all
Naturally, my recent roundup of books on Cuba missed a couple of important contributions to that magical island nation's bibliography. Alongside Ned Sublette's seminal Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, Cuban saxophonist-turned-historian Leonardo Acosta's Cubano Be Cubano Bop: One
The mantle of unacknowledgement falls on many shoulders beyond the poetic brotherhood (and sisterhood): librarians, primary school teachers, booksellers, and so forth. The many small (this description apparently refers to circulation size) magazines and their preternaturally dedicated staffs existing across the U.S. and the known world are overqualified for
It was not too long ago (that's in historical time, not 24/7 time) that comics, along with blue jeans and rock and roll, were somehow considered--by anxious parents and the usual whack jobs--to be contributors to juvenile delinquency. It was just one of the great panics of
Before you are deluged with the press release parroting of what I hope are well-meaning literary journalists rushing to present you with the lists of forthcoming books for the fall season (as if you have come close to reading much of the last season's list), let me offer
If you are paying attention to the ideas I am trying to express here (I hope they qualify as ideas, and I thank you if you are paying attention), my vexation at the declining attention paid to the study of history is a regular sore spot. I lay the fault
I actually lived through and participated in the era unimaginatively referred to as the Sixties--there was war and drugs and madness and dancing in the streets, assassinations and a presidential resignation and Woodstock and Watts, the Black Panthers, the White Panthers, the Grey Panthers, and, well, you know, a lot
Add the names of Bill Mauldin and Jules Feiffer to Ed Sorel, Seymour Chwast, and David Levine, and this group of masters will give you a Mount Rushmore of American illustration for the latter half of the 20th century and onward. I have already noted Mauldin's two volume
You know a good chunk of time has passed when what was once viewed as aberrant achieves trend status and becomes simply idiosyncratic. For much of my life I have been fascinated by Cuba: the music, the politics, the food, the literature—pretty much everything. By the late 20th century,
