This Month's Articles
REVIEWING
Searching for Tina Turner
by Jacqueline E. Luckett
Reviewed by Jill Noel Shreve
How much of yourself will you give away? And when you realize there’s none of you left, what will you do to get yourself back? In her first novel, Searching for Tina Turner, Jacqueline E. Luckett asks her reader these two questions through the .....Read More
Open Letter
An Open letter to an old friend on The Perils of Celebrity
by Herb Boyd
For more than a score of years Dr. Cornel West has been among the nation’s leading public intellectuals—black, white or otherwise. His bona fides have earned him a heavy five-figure payday for a two-hour lecture across the planet, and the demand is such that he confesses that he has yet to spend a weekend in Princeton, where he’s a professor of .....Read More
REVEWING
2666
by Robero Bolano
Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong
Roberto Bolano is a difficult writer to grasp, both in terms of what he wrote and who he was. During his life, his relative insignificance on the literary scene outside Latin America prevented the gathering of any biographical details beyond the major facts of birth, marriage, and dates of publication. When his first major work, The Savage Detectives, was published in English in 2007, Bolaño gained a cult following, but it wasn’t until the English version of 2666 published in...Read More
ESSAY
The Walk
An essay by Fred Beauford
As I began my walk, a sudden, uncontrolled thought entered my mind. It made me feel all at once happy to be alive; and, in a moment of outright conceit, I was more than happy that I was an old somebody (admittedly literary), rather than an old nobody.
This day, for reasons so far unknown, I was profoundly grateful for that important fact of life.
This long walk is something I have been doing for years. For me, ....Read More
REVIEWING
Railroads in the Old South: Pursuing Progress in a Slave Society
by Aaron Marrs
Reviewed by Dr. Owen Brown and Dr. Gale E. Gibson
The railroads occupy an iconic place in the historiography of America’s development, from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. The construction of railroads across America played an integral role in moving goods and people, and in the process, revolutionized inter and intra-state commerce. Additionally, it reduced the social distance between the cities of the Northeast and the emerging cities along the Mississippi River, such as St. Louis, Memphis, and New.....Read More
REVIEWING
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong
by Terry Teachout
Reviewed by Ken Liebeskind
New biography doesn’t spare criticism of America’s foremost trumpeter
Louis Armstrong was “a black man born at the turn of the century in the poorest quarter of New Orleans, who, by the end of his life, was known and loved in every corner of the earth,” Terry Teachout writes near the beginning of Pops, the new biography of Armstrong that doesn’t completely tarnish the notion of the well loved Armstrong, but challenges it with lucid depictions of the criticism that was directed.....Read More
REVIEWING
Inherent Vice
by Thomas Pynchon
Reviewed by Katherine Tomlinson
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel finds the author in a playful mood. At 384 pages (roughly one-third the size of his last book, 2006’s Against the Day), Inherent Vice has a narrative that’s contained in both plot and place. As a result, Inherent Vice may very well be a gateway novel to the writer’s earlier work, a sort of literary amuse bouche before a reader digs into the narrative feast that is.....Read More
REVIEWING
Lies My Mother Never Told Me
by Kaylie Jones
Reviewed by Andrea Janov
After I finished reading Kaylie Jones’ memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me, I tried to answer the question that most people ask when they finish a book: “What is this book telling me?” Usually this question is easy, but in this memoir, Jones touches on many intriguing topics: her famous father, best selling novelist James Jones, who wrote From Here To Eternity, his literary legacy and....Read More
REVIEWING
The Last Song
by Nicholas Sparks
Review By Jessica Lyons
Nicholas Sparks has done it again. With his latest novel, The Last Song, he constructs a riveting tale centering on the protagonist, Ronnie, a teenage girl who butts heads with her mother and muddles her way through life. She’s a magnet for trouble, has given up on playing the music she used to love, and can’t seem to recover from her.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Anthologist
by Nicholson Baker
Reviewed by Jamie Metrick
It is the sad truth that in these modern times, writers have figured out how to lead a (somewhat) healthy, rewarding life and still be a published author. But without an abusive father like Tennyson, or a life marred by death, like Edgar Allen Poe, or the mental illness and suicide of Vachel Lindsay, how can one expect lasting praise and fame? Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist plays....Read More
REVIEWING
The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
Extinctathon Revisited
Do humans deserve a second chance?
Reviewed by Janet Garber
Interspersed in this compelling tale of the last humans’ survival in a post-apocalyptic world are dopey, goofy, frankly godawful sermons by God’s Gardeners, a nutty-crunchy, tree-hugging religious sect. Vegetarians who dress in shapeless recycled shmattes raise crops and honey bees on a squatters’ building rooftop, school their kids in the lifesaving qualities of maggots .....Read More
REVIEWING
Anna In-Between
by Elizabeth Nunez
No (Wo)Man Is an Island
Loretta H. Campbell
“We are the ones they could not break. We are the progeny of the ones they had to leave behind on the islands, the ones they could not tame for Georgia, the ones who refused to die.” --Anna In-Between
Anna the main character in this exemplary novel says this about her ancestors the West Indians, descendants of slaves, who have forged freedom and a new race in the Caribbean. Elizabeth Nunez, author of the superlative Bruised Hibiscus, sets....Read More
REVIEWING
Why Women Have Sex
Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between)
by Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss
Reviewed By Elizabeth Sher
A Long Winded Research Project About the Physiology and Psychology of Female Sexual Behavior.
The authors are both psychology professors from the University of Texas, Austin. Cindy Meston, PhD, and David M. Buss, PhD, offer insights into female sexuality from their extensive research. Why Women Have Sex is a book of research project results that are based on new research, including previous researches from the authors. The geographical areas surveyed in this research include women in the United States, Belgium, France and Italy. Why Women Have Sex appears to have been inspired by the classic 1966 Masters and Johnson’s book, The Human Sexual Response. The authors,....Read More