Books

Book Review: “B-Side Books: Essays on Forgotten Favorites” — Viva the Overlooked!

May 24, 2021
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This slim volume is the ideal antidote to something like Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon and the other beefy works that lay out The Official Reading List For All Educated Persons.

Book Review: “The New Climate War” — Enough of the Doomsayers!

May 22, 2021
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This incisive volume will assist the creation of a much-needed collective effort, helping to frame a unified approach to waging combat on those who are destroying the environment for the sake of short term profit.

Book Review: “The Anglo-Saxons” — An Era of Continual Turmoil and Buried Treasures

May 21, 2021
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Medievalist Marc Morris has written an engaging account of turbulent times in a suitable and interesting style.

Poetry Review: Marcia Karp’s “If By Song” — Verse Passionate and Unruly

May 20, 2021
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This is a volume filled with complex pleasures and pains, assembled with purpose.

Film Review: “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue” — Existing as a Writer in China Today

May 18, 2021
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For those with sufficient patience and imagination — and are eager to learn more about the Chinese literary scene than what’s found in journalistic headlines — Jia Zhangke’s documentary will be an uncommon treat.

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.

Book Interview: Bill Nowlin on the Little Label That Could — Fifty Years at Rounder Records

May 17, 2021
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For local music enthusiasts of all stripes, the hometown label was a point of pride; for musicians and fans the world over, Rounder was the go-to source for music you couldn’t readily find elsewhere.

Book Review: “The Life of the Mind” — A Spot-on Portrait of the Postmodern Blues

May 17, 2021
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Christine Smallwood’s courage in looking at the way things are — for many of us — makes this novel about the pervasiveness of angst a subtle, empathetic accomplishment.

Book Review: “Robert E. Lee and Me” — An Incomplete Reckoning

May 16, 2021
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This is a noble effort to reconcile with the Southern past — but are suggested changes in nomenclature — rather than statements of moral and political clarity — good enough?

Book Review: “Shooting Midnight Cowboy” — A Very Good Read

May 14, 2021
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What motivated me to read this book? Not for a special love of Midnight Cowboy, a movie which I like but isn’t ultimately important to me. It was to learn about James Leo Herlihy, who has interested me since I was an adolescent.

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