To the editor:

Just by accident I stumbled online on Fred Beauford’s memoir “The Day I Saved Michael Jackson Career.” Needless to say, it blew me away. I teach the bare basics of public relations to high school students in Washington State, near Seattle. I just want you to know that I am going to share this with my students, to show them what really goes on in the real world. Thanks for publishing such an enlightening article. And also, thanks for putting out such an intelligent publication; you are showing my young students that the web need not be just about sex and celebrities behaving badly.

Gordon Rice

REVIEWING

Reading My Father

by Alexandra Styron

Reviewed by Sally Cobau

If staying up way too late reading is any indication of a book’s merit, then this blurry-eyed testimony--it’s the next morning—reflects the value of Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron.  Although the book is not by any means a mystery, Styron plays the part of curious detective as she deciphers the truth about her enigmatic father, the brilliant, cantankerous, Pulitzer-prize winning author of Sophie’s Choice.

Reading My Father is unique among the abundance of literary memoirs in both its tone and intentions.  Rather than being a “daddy dearest” tirade against an absent, sometimes frightening parent (when it certainly could have been—I’ll relay a few horrifying scenes in a moment), Styron acts like a cool archeologist, fixing an unblinking eye towards the truth.  In fact, in some ways the memoir is more of a biography, as Styron recreates the world that formed the writer, carefully and gracefully exploring her father’s formative years and even going back a couple of generations.
  In the aptly named Reading My Father most of the clues surrounding her father are offered in the form of the written word.  So Styron goes.....Read More

REVIEWING

Haki Madhubuti:
A Tradition of Liberation Narratives:New and Collected Poems
1966-2009

Reviewed by Brenda M. Greene

if poetry is to have meaning
it must mean something
more than metaphor and simile
more than tree-talk and looking for gigs
more than competition in unrhymed free verse
serious to the bone of incomprehension
surely to land the poet
a guggenheim or macarthur genius grant.

Woven through Haki Madhubuti’s Liberation Narratives , is the theme of the poet as artist.  The role of the poet reflects a long term debate in the literary canon, a debate that was central to the Black Arts Movement where Madhubuti emerged in the 1960s as the progressive and.....Read More

REVIEWING

The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies — How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

by Michael Shermer

Reviewed by Michael Carey

Why do people believe? We all believe in something, and I know I’ve sometimes asked myself, “How can someone think that way?” In Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain, he explores that opening question through science. His answer is, “We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the contexts of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large: after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow. I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependent on the beliefs that we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.”

Dr. Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and worked on or penned nearly a dozen other books. He is well educated and versed on the subject he tackles in The Believing Brain. Through several ....Read More

REVIEWING

Joy for Beginners

by Erica Bauermeister

Reviewed by Janet Garber

Twinkies

What a vogue there’s been the last few years in women writing novels about women banding together, mostly outside the purview of their men, to read books, fight Nazis, and accomplish great things.  Karen Joy Fowler’s Jane Austen Book Club (2007), a New York Times bestseller and later feature film, comes to mind, as does Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows” epistolary novels, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008).

In Joy for Beginners, five women (or six, or seven, depending how you count) come together and bond, first to form a baby-holding circle for Sara who’s coping with newborn twins and a toddler, and later to care for Kate who’s battling breast cancer and undergoing chemo.  Each of these different women has a story, naturally, many involving men who have run out on them, and each, it turns out, gets to go on a quest.  Whether they run off to Europe, train for a marathon, or get a tattoo, the implication is.....Read More

PORTFOLIO

Portfolio

by Kara Fox

The Life Changing Photography of Gil Garcetti

Gil Garcetti is a man who changes lives. As former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, he was known for prosecuting many high profile cases, O..J..Simpson and the Menendez brothers among others. And now, as an urban photographer, he creates daunting images to motivate, educate and to help change the world for so.....Read More

REVIEWING

22 Britannia Road

by Amanda Hodgkinson

Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong

One unfortunate legacy of the Cold War is that even today, Americans' understanding of the Second World War is almost entirely focused on Western Europe and the Pacific theatre. Although the Iron Curtain has long since fallen, our knowledge of Eastern Europe has remained vague. Amanda Hodgkinson's first novel, 22 Britannia Road, lifts this veil to provide an occasionally fascinating glimpse into the Eastern European experience of the war through the eyes of a young couple, Janusz and Silvana Nowak, and their young son Aurek.

The story opens with Silvana and Aurek's arrival in England and reunion with Janusz and focuses on the .....Read More

ART NEWS

Art News

Update 7/19/11

The management of Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 4.2 million users in more than 100 countries worldwide, has issued comments relating to the ongoing liquidation of Borders to clarify misconceptions about Kobo that have been inaccurately reported by the media and misunderstood by consumers. 

Kobo management provides the following facts regarding the company:

Kobo is a privately-held company that offers over 2.4 million eBooks, newspapers, and magazines -- one of the largest eReading catalogues in the world.

Readers from over 100 countries across the globe download and read using Kobo’s top-ranked eReading applications for iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows and MacOS.  Kobo is the eReading application of.....Read More

SHORT STORY

Where Were You in the Blizzard?

A Short Story by Jan Alexander

It was a raw night. A January storm we’d be talking about the rest of the year; where were you that weekend it snowed three feet? That was back when Mike Dudley was tending bar at the Main Street Ale House. He was already getting beefy and chuckling at his own jokes, and he was only twenty-two. He watched a few regulars tromp in with the winds still biting at them, observed the snow clinging to their hats, and he said, “We don’t serve white people here,” then laughed because no one else did.

He was a little afraid of Gillian, the blowsy bar manager who was a witch. He imagined she could freeze him in that spot behind the bar forever. But she seemed to like him. She liked to tickle his love handles and search him for microphones. She called him Mike The Spy, because he’d gone to the C.I.A. and at first she didn’t know he meant Culinary Institute of America. That night she pointed him to the far end of the bar and said, “Go make friends with Andy Jensen.” The witch could read .....Read More

REVIEWING

The House of Wisdom
How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance

by Jim al-Khalili

Reviewed by Jane M. McCabe

To counter the claim that they’ve fallen behind Western nations in science and technology, Muslim intellectuals say this wasn’t always so, that, in fact, during the 9th, 10th & 11th Centuries AD, the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad was the most advanced civilization in the world. Because Arab scholars of this time translated the works of Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy and Euclid from Greek into Arabic, they in effect saved these ancient texts so that during the 14th, 15th, & 16th Centuries they could be re-translated into Latin in Spain and Italy, thus inspiring the Renaissance and the birth of scientific inquiry in the West, the engine that drove West’s dramatic technological advance.

Jim al-Khalili, a theoretical nuclear physicist at the University of Surrey in England, is an Iraqi—his father is a Shi’a Muslim of Persian descent and his mother is British. He grew up in Baghdad; though he hasn’t lived there since 1979, it formed.....Read More

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NOVEL

The African Gentleman

…and The Plot to Re-establish The New World Order

A Novel by Fred Beauford

Chapters 26-27

26

I found myself constantly thinking about Gladys. I have never had children and I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of offspring we would produce. I knew that I was about as African as you can get these daysand she was still a Northern European, despite whatever else she called herself.

A friend, who had a similar background to mine, and who married a woman a lot like Gladys, told me a  story that to me, that turned very sad, indeed.

“”I have three girls,” he explained, “and there it is still the white skin that gets all the attention. What are girls to do? What can I say to them when I myself preferred a white skin to sleep with?” he asked, with genuine anguish in his voice.

I had nothing to say to him, but his comments did stir something deep inside of me.

27

Whatever the case, Gladys is turning into one strange bird, but I suppose....Read More

ART BEAT

Art Beat- June 2011

by Lindsey Peckham

Cory Arcangel at the Whitney

This show struck a particularly nostalgic nerve for me, as it spans three decades of video gaming, and any art exhibit with an excuse to put a Nintendo 64 on display is all right with me. The humor that Arcangel intertwines with a genuine commentary on the impermanence of technology is a potent and fun mix that is a refreshing kick-start to the summer season. There are also wire sculptures that were entirely created by machines whose moving parts were....Read More

REVIEWING

The Uncoupling

by Meg Wolitzer

Reviewed by Jill Noel Shreve

“People like to warn you,” writes Meg Wolitzer in her newest novel, The Uncoupling, “that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.” With this opening line, Wolitzer triggers the first domino in a complex arrangement. As readers watch each piece fall into place, they will witness the delight of a spellbinding story.

Wolitzer sets The Uncoupling in the fictitious town of Stellar Plains, New Jersey, and the narrative follows a snippet of Robby and Dory Lang’s lives. These two midlife English teachers at ....Read More

REVIEWING

Poles Apart

by Audry R.L. Wyatt

Reviewed by Barbara Snow

A good story shows us people struggling to change, to make life better. It makes us care about them enough to forget that we’re reading a story and inspires us to changes of our own. The characters in Poles Apart are lovable in their humanness and forgivable in their fears and confusion, particularly since the patterns with which they struggle result from some of the most horrendous experiences possible.

Chaim Schlessel spent nearly half of his formative teen years in Auschwitz and lost his family there. He committed to living his life fully and joyfully as the only way to make sure the oppressors failed....Read More