Golden sunlight on a baseball field carved out of pristine Iowa farmland. A row of stands where immaculately dressed spectators wave little banners. Beer out of a paper cup, a nickel a pop. And young men, nine to a side, playing a game that’s as entrenched in the heart of pastoral America as the pasture itself. Only, this Norman Rockwell painting hides the full truth, because among the spectators is a man working for a major league baseball team. He’ll drive ten thousand miles this […]
“I
Can we talk about the F-word?
“Like a movie reel run in reverse”
Wow. I’ve been sitting here considering just copy-pasting “wow” two hundred and forty-nine times. I’d give this book six stars if I could. I think North Korea holds a fascination for many of us in the west. Certainly it does for me. I was eight when the Berlin Wall fell; old enough to know that something was happening, but too young to really grasp the significance. North Korea is the only closed country I’ve ever been aware of. Cuba is near enough and porous enough […]
Book of Ages by Jill Lepore
Book of Ages was a 2013 National Book Award finalist in the non-fiction category. Historian Jill Lepore pieces together the life of Ben Franklin’s sister Jane and in doing so not only reveals the life of a fascinating “ordinary” 18th-century woman who happened to be the beloved little sister of a Founding Father, but also demonstrates her own prodigious skills as an historian. Lepore’s work is specifically about Jane but more broadly about history and historians, biography and novels, and determining whose lives are worth […]
That’s More Like It, Mary!
I have no idea why the author & book information was left out; it is there in the draft. Anyway, the book is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach. This is the purchase link: http://www.amazon.com/Gulp-Adventures-Alimentary-Mary-Roach/dp/0393081575. Ah, this is what a Mary Roach book should be.
Anarchy in Italy
Graphic memoirs are in a real danger of becoming an old hat. The genre seemed so groundbreaking in the early 90’s when Art Spiegelman finished Maus, or even in 2000 with Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and there are still some interesting work published under the umbrella “graphic memoir.” And it’s a good thing that the new comic book releases shelve in our local library calls to me like heroin calls to Iggy Pop, or I might have missed one of them, namely Ulli Lust’s