Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Despite the depiction of the many triumphs of three of the greatest jazz musicians—many might argue of musicians in any genre—3 Shades of Blue is…
Tag: Review by Walter Cummins
The Freaks Came Out To Write : The Definitive History of The Village Voice, The Radical Paper That Changed American Culture by Tricia Romano
Public Affairs Walter Cummins In my long-ago youth I was one of the thousands of young poseurs, the wannabes from the outlying regions like New Jersey, who descended on Greenwich…
Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray
Picador Review by Walter Cummins As I read John Gray’s Feline Philosophy, I couldn’t help thinking of the concluding lines of Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But…
Erasure and American Fiction: Percival Everett in Fiction and Film
Graywolf Press | Orion Pictures Essay by Walter Cummins Is if fair to compare a book and its movie version? A friend who was a Hollywood writer argues that they…
A Scrap in the Blessings Jar: New and Selected Poems by David Bottoms
LSU Review by David Starkey Now that I’ve read A Scrap in the Blessings Jar, I’m not sure how the late David Bottoms flew under my radar for so long.…
God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Doubleday Review by Walter Cummins Meghan O’Gieblyn opens and closes God, Human, Animal, Machine with detailed descriptions of her meaningful relationships with beings—in effect, machines— that were the creations of…
Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu
Norton Review by Walter Cummins You probably haven’t realized it, but at this very moment you’re reading intellectual property (IP). It’s a new concept to me too. I’ve been writing…
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel, Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Harper Reviewed by Walter Cummins Although the Covid-19 outbreak of 2020 didn’t turn out to be nearly as bad as the 14th century European Black Death, in the midst of…
My Friends by Hisham Matar
Random House Review by Walter Cummins My Friends is a haunted novel. Haunted by loss of places and people, by distressing memories, by the scars of a physical wound, by…
The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens by Helena Kelly
Pegasus Review by Walter Cummins Not only could the title of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, be appropriate for Helena Kelly’s exposé of the many biographical deceptions she has…