This Month's Articles
REVIEWING
Miss Me When I’m Gone
By Philip Stephens
Reviewed By Michael Carey
Philip Stephens, an award winning poet and author of the poetry collection, The Determined Days, once said, “At their best, short stories contain the germ of a novel, and there’s no reason poems can’t do that as well.” The stories told in his acclaimed poetry seem to have developed, grown, and flourished in his first novel, Miss Me When I’m Gone.
Stephens presents to the reader the beautifully described image of the declining town of Apogee, Missouri and its surroundings, speckled with colorful and amusing characters that add levity even as they propelthe story.
Miss Me When I’m Gone centers on the Harper family. Their youngest son, Cyrus, is a folk musician without recent success. A review .....Read More
REVIEWING
The Warmth of Other Suns—The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
by Isabel Wilkerson
Reviewed by Herb Boyd
There was a time, around a decade or so ago, that I was delighted and looked forward to reading one of Isabel Wilkerson’s articles in the New York Times. Not only would the topic be of abiding interest, her skillful writing always managed to take it to another level of appreciation and insight. Everything about her taste, her style, her way with words, rang with conviction and authority.
Clearly, I was addicted and then came the withdrawal symptoms when I discovered she was no longer at the paper, leaving me with no idea of why or wherefore she had gone.
Holding her heavy tome—and I mean heavy in weight and wisdom—it is evident where she’s been, and if this isn’t selected for one of the top literary awards there is no justice.....Read More
A WRITER'S WORLD
"Pay Attention to the Pause!"
by Molly Moynahan
"I don't get it, Mom. You don't have a real job but you're always busy." My sixteen-year old son made this remark one morning when I was busy reading Vogue, staring into space and patting the cat.
"I'm a writer," I huffed. "Anyway, I do have a job." I was teaching a part-time ACT/SAT prep course two hours a morning. And writing a memoir, revising a play, constructing a blog and keeping up with the endless list of reality TV shows Bravo had forced me to watch.
"Yeah, but that's not a real job. I work all day. You…" he looked at me closely. "What do you do all day?"
This busy thing struck a nerve. My son had noticed.....Read More
REVIEWING
Trials of Zion
by Alan M. Dershowitz
Reviewed by Janet Garber
Alan M. Dershowitz is an amazing man, by anyone’s standards. and he has nothing to prove to anyone. He’s one of the best known criminal and civil liberties lawyers and a staunch defender of Israel, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and author of hundreds of articles and 30 books. According to the biography on his website, he has “written, taught and lectured about history, philosophy, psychology, literature, mathematics, theology, music, sports – and even delicatessens.” A Renaissance man, in short.
But why does Dershowitz feel the need to pen a thriller? To draw on his unique insights into the legalities at issue in the Mideast, to dramatize the troubled.....Read More
MEMOIR
…and Mistakes made Along The Way
An excerpt from a memoir by Fred Beauford
Chapter Ten—Social Action
The answers to my many problems would soon come my way. First, I was able to solve the problem of fees. At the outrageous cost of $75.00 per credit, NYU was among the most expensive schools in the country (we won't even talk about what it currently costs per credit, many year’s later). I discovered that by working for the university, they would cover the cost for up to eight credits, just the amount that I was taking.
The day I walked into NYU’s personnel office, I couldn’t have been happier, because lo and behold, who should be sitting behind the desk interviewing me but a fellow by the name of.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe
by J. Randy Taraborrelli
Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe
Marilyn Monroe came from ordinary if somewhat odd people. Born on June 1, 1926, in the charity ward of Los Angeles General Hospital, she was the illegitimate daughter of Gladys Monroe, a woman whose mental instability was such that by the age of three, Norma Jean, as she was called, was placed in the foster home of Ida and Wayne Bolender, where she remained until she was nine years old.
She was befriended by a friend of her mother’s, Grace McKee, who took custody of her. When Grace remarried she felt she had no choice but to place Norma Jean in an orphanage. It was Grace who saw her potential for show business and encouraged her to become an actress.
Despite the phenomenon that Marilyn became and notwithstanding her extraordinary career in show business, her life was.....Read More
REVIEWING
Freedom
by Jonathan Franzen
Reviewed by Sally Cobau
Weird, isn’t it? You’re reading Jonathan’s Franzen’s new novel Freedom, kicking into a pleasant reading groove, when you start to recognize yourself--specifically the way you talk—in the main character, Patty. Scary. Especially when you begin to understand why Patty talks this way, using slang and the word “weird” to undercut what others are saying and to convey everything from lethargy to anger. “Weird” isn’t the correct word to use at all, it’s a misnomer in fact, but using the word only fuels Patty’s disdain for those around her (“they wanted sociopathic, they wanted passive-aggressive, they wanted bad. They needed Patty to select one of these epithets and join them in applying it to Carol Monaghan, but Patty was incapable of going past “weird”).
She’s maddening to be around and.....Read More
Art Beat - NOVEMBER 2010
Art Beat
By Lindsey Peckham
Collette Blanchard Gallery
Jessica Ann Peavy
Emergency Contraception
This Lower East Side gem of a gallery is featuring single-channel videos by Jessica Ann Peavy through the end of the year; videos that act as confessionals for four characters who divulge their romantic encounters. It's a fourth wall-shattering trick, and as a result, we as audience members call into question the truthfulness and ultimately the integrity of the confessors, as their stories twist and overlap, juxtaposing the mundane with.....Read More
REVIEWING
Kraken
by China Mieville
Reviewed by Katherine Tomlinson
China Mieville's Kraken begins with the theft of a giant squid and the massive, formalin-filled tank where it was displayed at London's Darwin Centre. The crime is so odd and so logistically complex—the dead squid was nearly nine meters long—that it baffles Billy Harrow, the curator of mollusks at the Centre and the man in charge of the crowd-pleasing exhibit, even more than it intrigues the police.
The theft of the squid they called "Archie" (for its scientific name Architeuthis dux) leaves Billy oddly disoriented, as if something about the squid's presence had been anchoring him and now he's .....Read More