Milo and the Calf

Tag: book reviews

  • Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead

    Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems Danez Smith A slim, early volume by one of my favorite working poets. You can see the visceral power and honesty here, (some of the poems here are repeated in the more comprehensive Don’t Call Us Dead) but perhaps it isn’t as fully developed as I think it is in…

  • Hayes’s American Sonnets to My Once and Future Assassins

    American Sonnets to My Once and Future Assassins Terrance Hayes Another gut punch of a book of poetry by a black man. Viscerally moving sonnets about race, love and America.  Most pointedly what its like to reflect backwards, and think ahead, in Trump’s America. For many years, I didn’t read much poetry, but lately, I’m…

  • Boyarin’s The Jewish Gospels

    The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ Daniel Boyarin Daniel Boyarin is one the most interesting scholars of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity working today. He’s also, usually, an incredibly dense and academic writer. I read, and loved, his book Borderlands, but I’m also not sure I understood it. The Jewish Gospels is…

  • Wright and Hope’s Billion Dollar Whale

    Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World Tom Wright and Bradley Hope     Kind of a business tell all book, but in the end more a book about hubris, greed, and insane spending sprees. This is a book about Jho Low, an overweight soft-spoken Malaysian who would, with…

  • Steinhauer’s Middleman

    MiddlemanOlen Steinhauer If literate, smart, fast paced thrillers are your thing, you should pick up every Olen Steinhauer novel as soon as it is published. He is without a doubt amongst the best in the business. This thriller about a leftist social movement (or is it a terrorist organization?) which one day tells its members…

  • Heaney’s The Cure At Troy

    The Cure At Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ PhiloctetesSeamus Heany I learned about this initially from Bill Clinton’s contribution to “By the Book” in the New York Times, a place where I’ve found scores of books to read, though none perhaps as powerful as this one. Here, Heaney retells the story of Philoctetes, who on…

  • Solider’s Whereas

    Whereas: Poems Layli Long Soldier Another book of contemporary poetry, this one short listed for the National Book Award. More formally experimental than Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead, this one left me feeling a bit cold. While stylistically interesting, I found it a bit cold, and I prefer my poetry rawer, I think. Still, and…

  • Heraclitus Fragments

    FragmentsHeraclitus A strange and beautiful little book collecting the surviving fragments of poetic writings of Heraclitus, a pre-socratic philosopher and poet. None of the fragments collected here are complete, so it difficult to under how exactly they fit into the longer works to which they once belonged, but here, in a relatively new translation, and…

  • Woodward’s Fear

    Fear: Trump in the WhitehouseBob Woodward You know this one. Woodward’s latest tell all, this time about the campaign and first year of the Trump presidency. I read all the Woodward books, largely out of habit at this point, and I weighed whether or not to read this one – I have enough trump in…

  • Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead

    Don’t Call Us Dead Danez Smith A stunning work of poetry. A book that left me breathless, and thrusting it into my wife’s hands, saying “you need to read this”. A work both political and deeply, deeply, personal full of poems that address race, love, manhood and more, tackling the deeply toxic race relations in…