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.”
Becoming Cary Grant
by Benjamin Schwarz for Atlantic Monthly (Jan 23, 2007)
” “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point.” That meeting — when Archie Leach, the Bristol-born son of a part-Jewish suit presser, came to be fully assimilated by his creation, Cary Grant — amounts to one of the great events in the annals of twentieth-century culture.”
How Debate Team Became Cool
by Stacy A. Teicher for Christian Science Monitor (Jan. 22, 2007)
” The high school debaters featured in Cross-X can cram a long string of words into a breathless minute. Journalist Joe Miller reproduces that intensity by cramming at least three intertwined stories into one book.”
Chile Con Mujeres
by Zee Edgell for Ms. Magazine (Jan. 21, 2007)
” Many readers will remember Isabel Allende’s bestselling The House of Spirits, her 1982 debut novel about a 20th-century family living in the unnamed country that represented her native Chile. In her latest work of historical fiction, Allende reaches back to the 16th century to recount the adventures of the real-life Inés Suarez, one of the few Spanish women who participated in Spain’s conquest of the New World and who is considered by some the founding mother of Chile. “
by Stephanie Rosenbloom for NY Times Books (Jan. 18, 2007)
“CERTAIN mortals have the power to sink hearts and sour moods with lightning speed. The hysterical colleague. The meddlesome neighbor. The crazy in-law. The explosive boss. A mélange of cantankerous individuals, they are united by a single achievement: They make life miserable.”
by Elaine Louie for NY Times Books (Jan. 18, 2007)
“FIRST came the books. Then came the architecture.
Seven years ago, when Nader Tehrani and Monica Ponce de Leon, partners at Office dA, an architecture firm in Boston, were asked to renovate a five-story town house in the Back Bay neighborhood, they faced a singular design challenge.”
