Verso Review by Brian Tanguay Many years ago I wrote a letter to my county supervisor protesting the proposed development of an avocado orchard near where my in-laws lived. I…
Category: Genres
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
Anchor Books Review by Gabriel Tanguay Ortega I can only begin this review by presenting my issues. I’m not sure what this book is about. Colonialism, white saviorism, the rape…
Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters by Charan Ranganath
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins It occurred to me that one approach to reviewing of Ranganath’s explanation of human memory would be to test my own memory as I recall…
The Big Green Tent: A Novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya, Translated by Polly Gannon
Picador Review by Brian Tanguay When I read the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago as a teenager I lacked the education to fully understand it. My youthful worldview was…
The Mighty Six-Ninety (690) by Alexander Hamilton Cherin
Review by Brian Tanguay In the early 1980s, before the consolidation of media ownership gathered steam, and well before the digital revolution completely altered the broadcast landscape, AM radio occupied…
The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O’Connor
Sourcebooks Review by George Yatchisin How much of writing is staring down the dark. (Just ask Dante and his selva oscura.) Of course that also means, how much of life…
Muse of Fire: World War I As Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets by Michael Korda
Liveright Review by David Starkey “Reading about how a succession of relatively small misjudgments and poor decisions can lead, with surprising speed, to human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale should,…
Roxy and Coco by Terese Svoboda
West Virginia Review by Walter Cummins My fine feathered friends. That phrase, dating back to the 1500s, occurred to me after I read Terese Svoboda’s novel Roxy and Coco. The…
Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World by Edward Humes
Penguin Review by David Starkey In 2013’s Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash, Edward Humes describes in detail the massive harm caused by America’s profligate production of trash. Garbology…
End of Active Service: A Novel by Matt Young
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay Dean Pusey is broken. By the Marine Corps and a tour of duty in Iraq. By the circumstances of his birth and adoption. By confusion…