David Mehegan

Book Review: Bora Chung’s “Your Utopia” — A Deep, Rich Well of Imagination

February 22, 2024
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The stories in this collection are uneven, although to my mind the beauty and brilliance of the best outweigh the others.

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Book Review: “On the Isle of Antioch” — It is Believable? Does it Matter?

February 5, 2024
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If this is a fable, is there a moral?

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Book Review: “The Red Balcony” — A Novel About the Muddled Predicament of the Diaspora Jew

April 12, 2023
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The plot of The Red Balcony ticks along briskly. Jonathan Wilson is a gifted narrator and scene-maker.

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Book Review: Two Powerful Books from Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa — A Liberal Citizen of the World

January 27, 2023
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Engagingly written by a limpid stylist, The Call of the Tribe marshals a corps of sparkling intellectuals who have in common first-hand experience of dictatorship, a commitment to individual freedom, a belief in reasonably regulated free-market economies, and a rejection of the political zealotry of religion or the doctrinaire left and right.

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Book Review: “Refugee: A Memoir” — A Powerful Story of the Plight of Millions

June 11, 2021
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Refugee: A Memoir was not written to entertain but to outrage and activate.

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Book Review: “The Science of Abolition” — See No Evil

May 18, 2021
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Oh yes, they thought that to treat human beings like livestock was backward and doomed and obsolete and unscientific and fatally inefficient, but if any of them thought it was indefensibly cruel and morally intolerable, they show no awareness by the evidence of this book.

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Book Review: “New England Bound” — Slavery and the Puritans

June 8, 2016
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It is not surprising that Wendy Warren strains to find words to “comprehend the rank tragedy that resulted from enslavement.”

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Book Review: “Anger and Forgiveness” — Curb Your Choler

May 11, 2016
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Although Anger and Forgiveness is a work of systematic philosophy it is also provocatively personal.

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Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s Maximal Minimalism

October 23, 2015
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These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.

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Book Review: “The Dirty Dust” — Voices From the Underground, Sublime, Spiteful, Satiric

March 23, 2015
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The Dirty Dust is a novel of almost unbelievable invention, humor, pathos, eloquence, and fury.

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