Milo and the Calf

Tag: books

  • Review: Bolano’s Distant Star

    Distant Star Roberto Bolano Perhaps my favorite Bolano book yet.* A spin off of one of the chapters in Nazi Literature in the America’s this is the story of psychopathic fascist poet and murder. It’s also the story of how we justify Chile under dictatorship, the politics of art, and what literature is. Like all…

  • Review: Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy

    Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis J.D. Vance The book all your Brooklyn bearded buddies and khaki clad D.C. contacts were talking about. Billed as your guide (from a Yale Law grad no less!) to what the hell is happening in the white working class of the rust belt, this…

  • Review: Bolano’s By Night In Chile

    By Night In Chile Roberto Bolano Considered by many to be one of, it not the, greatest work by the Chilean master, By Night In Chile is the reflections of a dying priest, with a literary bent, on the life he lived. The books that captivated him, the generals who, the fellow Chileans lost in…

  • Melo’s Inferno

    A kind of sensationalistic kind of interesting novel of Brazilian street kid who goes on to become a drug lord of his favela before losing it all to betrayal, hubris and paranoia. Not a particularly new take on the story of the drug dealer (i.e. basically Scarface in Sao Paolo) but interesting none the less…

  • Review: Lopez’s Story of Buddhism

    The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to its History and Teachings Donald Lopez I thought I wanted a history of the central tenets of Buddhism, and that’s exactly what I got. It turns out though, that I think I wanted something a bit different. This history of Buddhism is a serious (if at times…

  • Review: Labbe’s Loquela

    Loquela Carlos Labbe Bolano-esque, but more formally experimental and less enjoyable (at least to this pleb). Like many such literary affairs, it’s plot, such as it is, centers on a love story. Of course, one of the lovers is a novelists, struggling to write. There is much discussion about the nature of writing, digressions into…

  • Review: Desai’s Marx’s Revenge

    Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism Meghnad Desai I’m genuinely surprised I don’t hear this book talked about more. On a macro level, Marx’s Revenge makes the argument that Marx would have welcomed globalization (the left’s boogie man of the day in 2004 when this came out) as the evitable…

  • Review: Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time

    The Fire Next Time James Baldwin The latest in a long line of classics I should have read years ago. The latest in a series of reviews o books so important, so pivotal, that it’s absurd to try to write a review. Still, I’ll give it a go. This, Baldwin’s combination letter to his nephew…

  • Review Gonzales’s The Spitboy Rule

    The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band Michelle Cruz Gonzales Ok, so I know Michelle, the author of this book, and some of the other members of Spitboy, the band at the center of this story. There was a time, a long long while ago, when we were all close.…

  • There Are Scenes He Describes That Still Haunt Me — Coogan’s On the Blanket

    On the Blanket: The Story of the IRA’s Dirty Protest Tim Pat Coogan If Tim Pat Coogan isn’t the world’s greatest authority on the I.R.A., he’s definitely on the short list. A reporter for years and year with close ties to catholic ghettos of Northern Ireland, he has the sources and knowledge few others can…