(St. Martin’s) Review by Walter Cummins The “finally” in Henry Marsh’s title refers to the clear signal that death awaits him. After seventy years of avoiding admission of that inevitability,…
Category: Genres
Cure: New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix ‘Em by Neal Bodenheimer and Emily Timberlake
(Abrams) Review by George Yatchisin What Marseilles is to the Mediterranean, New Orleans is to the Caribbean, a savory meeting place where countries and cultures, priests and pirates, hopeful and…
Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe by Ian Kershaw
(Penguin Press) Review by Brian Tanguay In Personality and Power, historian Ian Kershaw poses and answers fundamental questions of historical analysis about twelve individuals who significantly impacted — for good…
Concrete Poetry: A 21st-century Anthology edited by Nancy Perloff
(Reaktion) Review by David Starkey Compare an accomplished short poem of several hundred characters—say Seamus Heaney’s “Wedding Day”—with just about any concrete poem of the same length, and you’ll quickly…
The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks
(Knopf) Review by Brian Tanguay The year is 1971. The place is Florida, south of Orlando. 81-year-old Harley Mann sits on the porch of the house he has lived alone…
Haven by Emma Donoghue
(Little, Brown and Company) Review by David Starkey The opening of Haven (the title’s similarity to “heaven” is hardly accidental) has the feel of a classic adventure story. A well-traveled,…
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) Review by Walter Cummins Like Rachel Aviv, the people whose mental issues she explores in Strangers to Ourselves are driven to write, some with works that…
You’ll Like It Here by Ashton Politanoff
(Dalkey Archive) Review by George Yatchisin A fascinating smudging of the notions of the novel, Ashton Politanoff’s You’ll Like It Here alternates between being charming and creepy, nostalgic and prophetic,…
The High Desert: A Memoir by James Spooner
Review by David Starkey On a grand scale, not much happens in The High Desert, James Spooner’s graphic memoir of his freshman year at Apple Valley High School, which he…
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
Review by Walter Cummins Rob Delaney doesn’t exploit the ironic connection of the title used for his four-season television series—Catastrophe—and this book about the sufferings and eventual death of his…