Milo and the Calf

Category: Books

  • Book Review: Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power

    We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy Ta-Nehisi Coates A collection of Coates journalistic pieces and other writings, most of which first appeared in the Atlantic, and many of which I’d read before. The pieces are organized chronologically, and importantly, tied to each year of the Obama presidency. Coates writes a thoughtful introduction…

  • Review: Zomorodi’s Bored and Brilliant

    Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self Manoush Zomorodi Another in a long line of books fretting over our distraction culture, this one focused on the importance of boredom in the creative process. I’ve read far more of these books than I care to admit (yet remain active…

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    Book Review: Westover’s Educated

    Educated Tara Westover The injuries in this book, the real bloody, life changing injuries. I wasn’t ready for that. I was ready for the story on the cover, of a woman raised by Mormon survivalists in the remote west, the story of a woman who didn’t know what the Holocaust was until she went to…

  • Book Review: Sternbergh’s Shovel Ready

    Shovel Ready Adam Sternbergh A crime novel set in post-apocalyptic New York City featuring a hit man with a heart of gold as the hero. New York has been hit with a dirty bomb, and most of the city has fled, or now lives their entire lives jacked into virtual reality. Except our hero, who…

  • Book Review: Miller’s Song of Achilles

    The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller If you’ve read the Iliad (and you really should read the Iliad) you know the basic outlines of Achilles life and, if you really paid attention, you remember Patroclus, his friend and consort whose death finally brings Achilles out of his moping to wage war on the Trojans. Miller’s…

  • Kurshan’s If All The Seas Were Ink

    If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir  Ilana Kurshan This book has been making the rounds among many of my friends and family and people’s reactions are so stark, and so diametrically opposed. There are those who love this book, who relate to its extreme bookishness, to the authors attempts to come to grips…

  • Goodell’s The Water Will Come

    The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World Jeff Goodell We all know the world is warming, we all know this will change the way we live. Goodell’s book doesn’t break any ground there, but what is does do is give us a very terrifying, very sobering, look…

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    Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

    Sing, Unburied, Sing Jesmyn Ward I read and loved Salvage the Bones, Ward’s first novel about a poor black and rural family preparing for hurricane Katrina. And I read, and cried, over her memoir Men We Reaped. But this, her latest about mothers and her children, about prison, about drugs, about race and violence and…

  • Fei’s The Invisibility Cloak

      The Invisibility Cloak Ge Fei Short novel set in contemporary China, ostensibly about love and high-end audio equipment. Really about a country grappling with mass hyper-urbanization, corruption, and huge wealth disparities. It plays out at first as a sort of surreal comedy, but quickly (the whole book is less than 200 pages) into a…

  • Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

    Zami: A New Spelling of the Name Audre Lorde The autobiography of one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. The story of a first-generation immigrant, a visually impaired girl, who dreamt of things far beyond what her mother could imagine. The story of a woman who read, and wrote, and worked the…