I had the immense pleasure of watching the author speak. Obiama is an incredibly charming, humble and wellspoken man and it is with great regret that his debut novel is nothing more that mediocre. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The novel is warm and full of faults and tiny promises. But it is also a novel in dire need of editing. Too many strands of plot got in the way of the story, overly flourish prose stilted the pace, and somehow still made […]
“Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man.”
I don’t know if I will recover from The Underground Railroad anytime soon; its brutal subject matter compounded by current events. I listened to the audiobook because it became available at my local library before the hard copy. There was as lot of beautiful language and descriptors which came alive with the narration but it was also hard to literally listen to all the racial slurs and recounts of abuse. “On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other […]
Practical Tactical Brilliance
Sarah Vowell’s books defy easy classification, which can make it annoying when people ask you about them. They are part history, part travelogue, part personal essay and yet that still does not seem to cover it. Her latest book, just out in paperback, concerns the relationship between the United States and the Marquis de Lafayette, the Frenchman whose support was so key during the American Revolution. Vowell begins fifty years after the start of the war, when Lafayette returned to the United States for […]
The “terror” here quickly becomes pretty dull
Okay, well I’ve had a run of some really great books, so I supposed I was due for a dud. This one starts out promising, but gets pretty boring pretty quickly. Being buried alive isn’t a particular fear of mine (not that it sounds like a good time or anything), mostly because I intend to be cremated, plus modern medicine has advanced to the point where they’re going to be pretty certain that you’re dead when the time comes. For hundreds of years, however, medicine […]
“An end to timidity – the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.”
You’d think in a non-fiction book about a professor, a madman and the dictionary, that the driest parts would be about the dictionary. Instead, those parts fascinated me while the biographical information about its two main creators bored me to tears. “In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and […]
Keeping up with the Kennedys … or what happens when you can’t
A few years ago Cracked wrote an article titled “Five Real Life Horror Movies Deleted From You History Books” that brought Rosemary Kennedy to my attention. Rosemary was intentionally hidden away from the public by her family after the lobotomy secured for her by her father failed spectacularly. The Kennedy family benefited from this tragedy happening before the Internet. Rose Fitzgerald, a staunch Catholic, married Joe Kennedy, an American business man with political aspirations, in 1914. The couple welcomed two sons, Joe Jr and John, […]
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