Refugee: A Memoir was not written to entertain but to outrage and activate.
Book Review: “The Science of Abolition” — See No Evil
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.
Book Review: “New England Bound” — Slavery and the Puritans
It is not surprising that Wendy Warren strains to find words to “comprehend the rank tragedy that resulted from enslavement.”
Book Review: “Anger and Forgiveness” — Curb Your Choler
Although Anger and Forgiveness is a work of systematic philosophy it is also provocatively personal.
Book Review: Patrick Modiano’s Maximal Minimalism
These three books by Patrick Modiano are short, intense, and sensuous.
Book Review: “The Dirty Dust” — Voices From the Underground, Sublime, Spiteful, Satiric
The Dirty Dust is a novel of almost unbelievable invention, humor, pathos, eloquence, and fury.
Book Review: Sanford Friedman’s Utterly Original “Conversations with Beethoven”
How well Conversations with Beethoven works as fiction will depend on the engagement and imaginative powers of the reader.
Book Review: “Trieste” — A Vivid and Lurid Chronicle of Horrors
As fiction, “Trieste” is almost entirely a dense tapestry of thinking, remembering, agonizing and raging.
Book Review: “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul” — A Lengthy Tale of Innocence Betrayed
Despite his weakness for overwriting, Bob Shacochis has a good and sad story to tell, and he gets through it with a degree of mastery.
Fuse Book Review: “The Infatuations” — Funereal Ruminations on a Murder
Perhaps it is not so much that the characters are thinly developed but that it is hard to make them out through the scrim of their Dostoevskian lucubrations.