This Month's Articles
LETTERS
Write Me A Letter...
Dear Fred:
You are doing a marvelous job with Neworld Review. I enjoyed reading Daji's review of Earnest Adams's book (From Ghetto to Ghetto: An African American Journey to Judaism). I have decided to buy it. The pictures he posted on Facebook brought back many memories. I recently listened to our debate concerning African American Studies. I am going to make you a copy with a photo, I wish you continued success with your publishing company and writings. I also enjoyed your novels.
Winston Duckett
Yonkers, N.Y.
Dear Fred:
I was very pleased to receive this email and the.....Read More
BEYOND BOOKS
Woman about Town
By Lindsey Peckham
I, the Woman About Town, am a very recent graduate of New York University, where a liberal arts degree and a business degree have prepared me to be the most efficient socialite-in-training possible. With 15 years of dance training and innumerable literature and art history courses behind me, a passion for the arts has now blossomed into a genuine, bonafied.....Read More
REVIEWING
Wench
By Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Reviewed by Janet Garber
What Time Hath Wrought
As bleak and “broken” as our prospects may appear in 2010, nary a one of us, I wager, Black or White, wants to return to the pre-Civil War era depicted in Wench. Nor do we have a hankering for the 1963 Mississippi of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, when relations between the races were only marginally better. So the first thought on reading Ms. Perkins-Valdez’s debut novel is inevitably, “how horrible,” and then, right behind it: “look how far we’ve come.”
Perkins-Valdez brings home the horror of slavery, and its very personal toll, by shadowing the.....Read More
REVIEWING
Wild Child
By T. C. Boyle
Reviewed by Sally Cobau
One could say that the stories in T.C. Boyle’s new collection, Wild Child, are all about forces of nature. There are mudslides, a feral child, wild cats, and rain—lots of rain. But other themes emerge in these stories as well—the fragility of our lives and how off-kilter they can become in the blink of an eye; the mad desire for bodily perfection and the way we navigate the world with myriad choices at every turn.
Boyle’s characters veer between being narcissistic and heroic. They stand knee-deep in .....Read More
MEMOIR
…and Mistakes Made Along the Way, an excerpt from a memoir
by Fred Beauford
Chapter Five—Mother
Hanging out in the projects and being a member of a street gang wasn’t all about listening to exciting music and dancing. It could sometimes be downright dangerous, and deadly. Also, I discovered that although typical New York teenagers in 1955 suffered from an existential dilemma that even Sartre couldn’t solve, blacks kids were filled with an additional rage that could surface at any moment.
I didn’t understand then, but do now, that this black rage was due to more than the typical teenage angst that inflicted almost every teenager in New York City, except, perhaps, Jewish-Americans. From what I could see, .....Read More
REVIEWING
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim
edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen
Foreward by Dan Wakefield
Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong
Missing a Beat is an apt title for the recently released collection of essays by Seymour Krim, a Beat writer and early acolyte of New Journalism, who has been lost to contemporary readers in the inevitable winnowing down of literature that occurs as time passes and the wheat is separated from the chaff. By no means does Krim ever climb to the level of Mailer or Ginsberg (although his bluntly titled essay Norman Mailer, Get Out of My Head!shows how much he longed for those heights), but nevertheless, there are more than a few kernels of his work that are worth preserving for future generations.
A product of New York City’s Jewish Washington Heights neighborhood.....Read More
REVIEWING
Foxy: My Life in Three Acts
by Pam Grier with Andrea Cagan
Reviewed by Loretta H. Campbell
Most Becoming Legend
What makes a woman a legend? Is it beauty? Is it brains? Should she be multi-lingual? What about sexy? Suppose she’s Pam Grier, and she’s all these things and more? The answers are in the questions. Grier, queen of, and a survivor from the blaxploitation film era, continues to be one of the most gifted actresses of her generation. Yet her talents have been barely tapped. In Foxy: My Life in Three Acts, A Memoir, she outlines the gifts that brought her fame.
It begins with humor about what could have been a fatal accident involving the infant Pam Grier and her.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Global Forest
By Diana Beresford-Kroeger
Reviewed by Jill Noel Shreve
“Trees copulate in copious amounts,” writes Diana Beresford-Kroeger in the essay, The Sexual Revolution, one of forty stories in her newest non-fiction project, The Global Forest. In this particular essay, she includes scintillating details of tree-mating habits and hones in on how trees “do it” when they please. But she doesn’t stop there. She takes the sexual appetite of trees one step further, writing, “For a plant such as a tree, sexual parameters are paramount to ensure a continuation of life.”
That’s the beauty of The Global Forest.
In her Irish-Gaelic, storytelling voice, Beresford-Kroeger hooks her audience by.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Art of Choosing
By Sheena Iyengar
Reviewed by Ken Liebeskind
Examining the concept of choice, from marriage to medical care.
Choice” seems like such a simple word, but when it’s thoroughly examined, it takes on the importance of “freedom,” a concept fraught with a deep-seated meaning that is one of the most fundamental tenets of social life.
In The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar, a business professor at Columbia University, examines choice from a variety of perspectives. She starts with a personal.....Read More