This Month's Articles

REVIEWING

Is Marriage for White People?

by Ralph Richard Banks

Reviewed by Fred Beauford

Truths Told and Truths Untold

   What is most interesting about reading books about the many problems still facing American blacks, is that the truths told are never quite as interesting as the truths untold. This book is a perfect example.

   First the truths told. Marriage as an institution has virtually collapsed for African Americans. As Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford University, writes in Is Marriage for White People? “The African American {marriage} decline is not limited to the poor. It now encompasses the middle and upper-middle class. Indeed, by some measures the racial gap in marriage is actually wider among the prosperous than among the impoverished.”

    Professor Banks concentrates his book on interviews with.....Read More

REVIEWING

A Small Hotel

by Robert Olen Butler

Reviewed by Sally Cobau

Broken Love

You have to be prepared for a book like A Small Hotel.  Slight, intense, elliptical, it’s a book that requires concentration and forbearance.  Brace yourself for the deep renderings of the slightest movement; stay still for the immersion in New Orleans—the water smells, the faint sound of a train whistle, the feel of alcohol sliding down a throat.

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes what’s small—the label on a bottle of Scotch, for example, and expands its meaning exponentially, so the label becomes a source for meditation on a housewife’s loneliness: “The Scotch is a deep amber and she looks closely at the Jacobean manor house.....Read More

REVIEWING

Adios, Happy Homeland!

by Ana Menéndez

Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong

Never have I had so many expectations—of both literature and people—overturned by a book. When I sat down with Ana Menéndez’s Adios, Happy Homeland! I was burdened with a boatload of preconceptions about Cuban literature. The list was embarrassingly long, including (but not limited to): magical realism, black beans, banyan trees, deserted streets drifting into ruin, long glances over the water toward Miami, tight-lipped reflections on Castro and the nature of repression, wild sensuality, rafts on the edge of the horizon, and the soft clapping of boats rocking together in run-down harbors…

It’s probably best to stop there. The only thing duller than a catalogue of personal prejudices is a catalogue of the many tired imitations of Garcia Marquez that have been granted ISBN numbers since One Hundred Years of Solitude was published some fifty-odd years ago. Not only does Menéndez’s book have no place in that uniform line-up, but Adios, Happy Homeland! tears apart the.....Read More

ESSAY

Becoming Ray Bradbury

by Jonathan R. Eller

Reviewed by Steven Paul Leiva

In 1982 I was a producer on an animated feature that Ray Bradbury was writing the screenplay for. He participated in frequent creative meetings with our artists, and when he came to the studio he would bound into my office (the only way he ever entered), usually wearing a tennis outfit and making a declarative statement before the door had closed behind him. I remember one time it was, “People send me metaphors in the mail! Isn’t that wonderful?”  He got no argument from us. But another time his declaration was, “I spoke at a writer’s conference yesterday. I told them they don’t have to read Saul Bellow!”

I found this disconcerting for two reasons. One, I was at the time reading The Adventures of Augie March, and while I have always found parts of Bellow difficult, I have also found other .....Read More

REVIEWING

STATE OF WONDER

by Ann Patchett

Reviewed by Emily Rosen

You may wonder why a woman in her 60s, 70s or even older would want to get pregnant. Or you may wonder why a scientist would want to risk her life in the pursuit of discovering the cause of death of a colleague or why a pharmaceutical company would want to continue to employ someone whose research is so secret that even the people who pay her are not privy to any information about what she is doing. Or you may wonder about the long term psychological effect on a Doctor after having blinded an infant during delivery. And you may even wonder why a man who loves his wife and three young children would be willing to risk the perils of jungle life, making the conscious choice to stay there beyond the “call of duty.”  The question is, which of the.....Read More

Letters to the Editor

Dear Fred:

Kara Fox's latest profile is amazing. The photos, the eye witness account - I'm really impressed with your magazine!

Best,
Barbara Abercrombie
Los Angeles

NOVEL

The African Gentleman

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

A Novel by Fred Beauford

Chapters 32-33

32

"Oh, stop it Eric," Gladys answered playfully. "If I partied the way you do I would never get anything done."

“Which would be my bad luck, wouldn’t it,” he answered with a sly twinkle in his light brown eyes.

She turned to me.

“This is Eric, my esteemed editor and publisher.” She turned back to him, “And this is my friend Jamison Omak.”

I held out my hand to meet his. “So, you are Eric, Gladys’ powerful muse, the one who inspires all of that creative juice,” I found myself saying to him in a friendly fashion, genuflecting, caught up in his web of charm.

“Ah yes, Jamison, the muse. The infamous muse,” he quickly answered, convincingly turning inward. “That ruthless bitch Goddess that promises everything, but gives little, and is never satisfied. Well, my new friend, you have the wrong man. I pay Gladys way.....Read More

PORTFOLIO

Portfolio: Kramer in Kostume

by Kara Fox

Forever, the memory of 9/11 is woven into the fiber of our nation. And as we leave September, and we continue to honor those who have suffered deeply, we enter a month resting at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum ...Halloween.

For me, one who thinks in terms of visual images, Kramer, my beloved Doberman exemplifies this month of pretend.

The beginning of my love affair with the Doberman Pinscher is rooted in a uniquely twisted experience. A body, naked and dead, was stuck in my brother's chimney! As the sole guardian of my two small children, and with the three of us living alone in a house with a chimney, I was justifiably scared.

"How do I protect us?" I thought, as I watched the police.....Read More

REVIEWING

The Taste of Salt

by Martha Southgate

Reviewed by Brenda M. Greene

The sea was never strange to me.  It was on land that I had difficulties, my lack of comprehension, my estrangement.

            In The Taste of Salt, Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl on the Left (2006) and The Fall of Rome (2002)examines the presence of “salt” in the life of Josie Henderson, a marine scientist, and a Black woman in a field where there are not only few women, but few Black scientists in general.  Josie, estranged from her past, has built an insular life for herself, and in doing so, has distanced herself from her family, has run away from intimacy and has married outside of her race.  Southgate explores.....Read More

REVIEWING

Train Dreams

by Denis Johnson

Read by Will Patton

Reviewed by Michael Carey

Denis Johnson is an award-winning author with an impressive and diverse bibliography. His latest endeavor, Train Dreams, a novella, is a tribute to the Northwest woods, from west Montana to Spokane, and its people in the early 1900s. For this audio book, the actor Will Patton delivers Johnson’s words with a slow, gravelly voice that encourages the listener to envision a rough woodsman or rail worker who might be spinning this tale in a saloon or by a campfire in the woods.

Train Dreams is the story of Robert Grainier, a man from .....Read More

TRAVEL

Confessions of a Travel Writer

by Roberta Sandler

In 720 B. C., athletes at the first Olympic competition shed their loincloths to compete in the nude. Among the spectators, not one female blushed - because, under penalty of death, women were forbidden to attend the games.

Here I was, standing in Ancient Olympia amid a landscape of ruins and antiquities once buried under a millennium of river silt and now excavated. Before me lay the columns of the Olympic stadium, the remnants of the mighty Temples of Zeus and Hera, the arena where 45,000 onlookers once cheered, and the altar where the Olympic flame was first ignited. To know the history of this place enhances the wonderment.

I have seen and learned much because I am a travel writer. For years, my income derived from writing freelance stories for “confession” magazines and articles for newspapers and consumer.....Read More