Grove Review by Walter Cummins In her author’s note Stephanie Sy-Quia states that the idea for this novel came from an actual family situation—the fact that her grandfather was a…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
Transcription by Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins The title defines the issue. This novel is a transcription of several experiences, especially conversations and interviews meant to serve as a…
Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta
Scribner Walter Cummins Ghost towns are usually pictured as abandoned places of decaying windowless houses and barren streets. Creamwood, New Jersey, is certainly not own of those, but a busy…
Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital by David Browne
Hachette Review by Walter Cummins “Slow Fall” suggests that the book is an elegy, but what actually happened to Manhattan’s West Village musical scene is that it took over the…
The Keeper by Tana French
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Although Tana French has won awards for crime fiction and mystery/thrillers, including an Edgar, The Keeper is little like our expectation of a mystery novel.…
Brawler by Lauren Groff
Riverhead Review by Walter Cummins The title of this collection is appropriate for each of its nine stories. In some literal brawls take place, the combatants physically scarred. In others…
The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes
Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins The image of Alfred Tennyson I’ve carried for decades goes back to the childhood card game of Authors that depicts him with a stately continence…
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 by Ian Buruma
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins While I was reading Stay Alive, bombs—many more powerful than those of World War II, others delivered by drones—were falling on a number of cities—Kyiv,…
A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
Penguin Review by Walter Cummin In A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, Michael Pollan makes an offhand reference to Plato’s cave, “where artificial agents are confined and forced to…