Reviewed with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me I started reading The Fire Next Time in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, reeling from the choice that my fellow Americans made and wondering where it all went wrong. Given my liberal/progressive bent, I was personally devastated and still am, and as the data came rolling in about Trump supporters, I was absolutely disgusted and enraged. Whites, including white women, went for Trump. Christians, including Catholics, went for Trump. And despite the initial assumption […]
What the heck are baggywrinkles?
Given to me as a birthday present, I was intrigued by the title and cover of “Baggywrinkles: A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea”. At the time I joked that it was a good length for me to include in my Cannonball Read this year. This past Saturday I was running out the door to sit in a waiting room and needed a new book to read. I reached for a sci-fi novel called “Nova” that’s been waiting to be read for months now only […]
She’s a working girl/She’s single and free
All right, I haven’t reviewed in ages, so I’m just gonna jump right into it. I read Factory Girls months ago – in April, to be exact – and it has just been stuck in my craw. The book is the work of Leslie Chang, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was based in China, and spent years following the lives of women working in factories in Guangdong province. As Westerners, much of what we know about these factories come from stories about exploitation in […]
You make the art that only you can make. You tell the stories only you can tell.
Neil Gaiman just gets it, man. This collection of miscellaneous non-fiction writings consists of various speeches, articles, essays, and introductions, and what it turns out to be is sort of a hodge-podge portrait of Gaiman as a writer and reader. Not every essay was of interest to me, and I did skip some of them that covered books I’d never read (and didn’t want spoiled . . . also, the one about Dogsbody Neil tells the reader to skip straight up and then come back […]
Bad feminist, good book
Bad Feminist is a book of essays in a time where social justice is getting perhaps more mainstream positive press than any time before. While every thinkpiece in this vein will have detractors, such thinkpieces have more outlets and more exposure than they might have enjoyed even ten years ago, when blogging was an established medium for this kind of thing but the social justice corner was still just that — a corner. What that means is that Bad Feminist doesn’t necessarily cover new ground, […]
The more things change …
Maya Angelou’s first autobiographical installment, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is widely considered to be the best of her series of autobiographies. Nominated for a National Book Award in 1970, this work has been a staple of high school reading lists, and banned book lists, for several decades. It is a beautifully written recollection of Angelou’s childhood, from the time she and her older brother were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother (Angelou was 5) until Angelou, […]
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