Category: Books
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Review: Winslow’s Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog Don Winslow Wow, what a read. A top-notch crime writer does the research and takes the time to understand the modern origins of the drug war in Mexico, then tells that story through the lives of petty criminals, cartel bosses, DEA agents and regular people caught up in the drug…
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Review: Chopra’s Shapeshifter
Shapeshifter: The Evolution of a Cricket Fan (awaiting publication) Samir Chopra For many sports fans, myself included, our personal lives are intertwined with the fortunes of millionaires we have never met. I remember watching, with my father, when Brett Favre threw for four hundred yards the night after his own father died. I remember the…
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Review: Kraus’s I Love Dick
I Love Dick (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) Chris Kraus A strange book; it unsettled me. Now, months after finishing it, I’m still not sure what I thought of it. The basic premise is well known – Kraus, filmmaker, theorist, and wife of French theorist Sylvere Lotringer has a short encounter with a theorist…
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Review: Smith’s Just Kids
Just Kids Patti Smith For the first fifty pages, I wasn’t sure about this one, but then something clicked and I couldn’t put this down. By now you know that this is the story of Smith’s early adulthood and her relationship Robert Mapplethorpe. The books starts with Smith as a child in New Jersey and…
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Review: Rankine’s Citizen
Citizen: An American Lyric Claudia Rankine I’m really not a poetry guy, but so many brilliant friends recommended this, I had to give it a go. So, so glad I did. A gut wrenching meditation on American racism both systemically, and personally this book had me in awe. Rankine not only makes brutal point after…
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Review: Fox’s The Riddle in the Labyrinth
The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code Margalit Fox I’ve been fascinated by the story of decipherment of Linear B, the language originally found by Authur Evans on Crete and eventually deciphered by the troubled amateur Michael Ventris, for years. It was a great puzzle — a sort of black…
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Review: Offill’s Dept of Speculation
Dept. of Speculation Jennifer Offill Beautifully written little gem of a book about marriage, kids, and betrayal. This is basically a book about a privileged Brooklyn intellectuals and their domestic problems. i.e. it is about me and my friends. Generally, I avoid this kind of stuff. As a rule, Brooklyn writers writing about Brooklyn writers…
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Review: Scott’s The Magicians
The Magicians: An Investigation of a Group Practicing BLACK MAGIC Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D. A strange little book about practitioners of so-called “Black” and “White” magic. The book is divided into two sections: one in which the author joins a “black magic” group and the other in which the author joins a sort of wiccan…
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Review: Beard’s Confronting the Classics
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations Mary Beard This is a collection of Beard’s reviews and essays from a number of publications, including many from the New York Review of Books. Organized in rough chronological order from Greece to the present, it is a bit of a hodgepodge. But what a wonderful hodgepodge it…
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Review: Colt’s Martial Bliss
Martial Bliss.: The Story of The Military Bookman. Margaretta Barton Colt A self-published memoir by the woman who co-ran the Miltiary Bookman, one of the legendary specialty bookshops that used to dot Manhattan in the pre-amazon days. Competently written, it tells the story of a now disappearing world of small used bookstores, staffed and frequented…
Milo and the Calf 