Hart Crane’s Bridge To Nowhere
by William Logan for NY Times Books (Jan. 28, 2007)
“Before Hart Crane’s leap into the Caribbean that fatal April noon in 1932, he folded his jacket over the ship’s rail with impeccable manners. Striking out into the glassy sea, he was seen no more, dying younger than Byron but older than Shelley.”
Midnight At The Oasis
by Max Rodenbeck for NY Times Books (Jan. 28, 2007)
“Around the time of the War of Independence, America’s main contact with the Middle East consisted in trading Caribbean rum for Turkish opium. It’s hard not to wish, reading the epic story of this 230-year relationship, now usefully condensed into a single well-researched volume, that things could have remained as simple as the swapping of your recreational poison for mine.”
The Recycled City
by Karen Olsson for NY Times Books (Jan. 28, 2007)
“Chris Abani has done an end-run around the immigrant novel. In two previous books, Abani, who was born in Nigeria, traced a path from third world to first: “GraceLand,” his bustling novel set in Lagos, closed with a young man’s departure for the United States; his novella “Becoming Abigail” followed the title character from Nigeria to London.”
Lusty Literature
by John Sutherland for Washington Post/Book Worlld (Jan. 28, 2007)
“Elisabeth Ladenson’s witty meditation on literary obscenity pivots on “irony, paradox, and absurdity.” How, she ruminates, can one generation’s “dirt” be another generation’s “art”? “How does an obscene work become a classic?” It’s a fascinating set of hows.”
The Rise of Radio
by Douglas Brinkley for Washington Post/Book World (Jan.28, 2007)
“Ear-splitting static was the curse of AM radio in its formative decades. A far-off bolt of lightning or stiff wind would cause a wallop of staccato crackles, pops and buzzes to emanate out of your home box. Determined to get the static out of radio, David Sarnoff, one of the founders of both RCA and NBC, put his technical mastermind, Edwin Armstrong of Columbia University, on the case.”
Being and Laziness
by JosephFrank for The New Republic (Jan. 25, 2007)
“Anyone with a claim to literacy is familiar with the names of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and can cite some of the titles of their most famous works. But Goncharov and his novel Oblomov, of which a new translation, a snappily colloquial and readable one, has just been published — who ever heard of them?”
Read full review at Powells.com
The Words Palette Extra
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The Book of Paul Auster
by Jill Owens for POWELLS (Jan. 24, 2007)
” Paul Auster has been writing beautiful, metaphysical, mysterious novels for a long time now. Some of them are funnier than others, some more devastating in their conclusions. He’s also written screenplays, poetry collections, essays, plays, and memoirs. His latest, Travels in the Scriptorium, could be seen as a distillation of much of his life’s work — a multi-layered, spare puzzle of existence and creation, conveyed in lovely, minimalist prose. Booklist admires it as “an archly playful and shrewdly philosophical tribute to the transcendence of stories.” “
Psycho Analyst
by Amy Bloom for NY Times Books (Jan. 21, 2007)
“If I were a snob, a liar, a drunk, a philanderer, an anti-Semite, a violent bully, a poseur and a menace to the vulnerable, I would want Linda Hopkins to write my biography.”
Armenian in Istanbul
by Lorraine Adams for NY Times Books (Jan. 21, 2007)
“There is a moral putrescence peculiar to the denial of genocide. Yet denial’s practitioners are all around us. The Sudanese government calls the butchers of Darfur “self-defense militias.” “
A Very Bad Day
by Ada Calhoun for NY Times Books (Jan. 21, 2007)
“Allen Rucker, a baby boomer with a career as a self-described Hollywood hack, was always “an inveterate catastrophizer,” he writes in this slender memoir, anxious of having to repeat high school, of financial ruin, and of one of his sons becoming a terrorist.”
