Books

Book Review: “Why Visit America” — Compelling Speculations on the Homeland

August 15, 2020
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It didn’t take long for this eminently readable and bingeable collection to draw TV adaptation attention.

Book Review: “Difficult Light” — Words Are Amazing Things

August 11, 2020
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A supple, evocative novel that meditates on family and loss and art.

Book Review: “Hollywood Babylon II” Revisited

August 10, 2020
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Hollywood Babylon II is almost as addictive, seductive, compulsively page-turning as its inglorious Hollywood Babylon predecessor..

Book Review: Why Listening to Community Voices Could Help Revive Local News

August 7, 2020
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If a new generation of community news organizations is to grow and thrive, then we need a renewed sense of civic engagement. And in order to foster that civic engagement, we need journalism that doesn’t just report the news but also listens and collaborates.

Author Remembrance: Writer Pete Hamill — Sane, Liberal, and Literate

August 7, 2020
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The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it’s not journalism.

Book Review: “The Boy in the Field” — A Brilliant Coming-of-Age Fable

August 6, 2020
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The Boy in the Field is the latest novel from Margot Livesey, a prolific writer with a keen eye for the interiority of her characters, a skill that enriches her novels with a rare intimacy and immediacy.

Book Review: “Chasing the Light” — The Agitated Life of Oliver Stone

August 4, 2020
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Filmmaker Oliver Stone’s memoir is an exhilarating primer for anyone who wants to understand his reputation as a writer and director.

Book Review: “Pew” — Someone Truly Out of This World

August 3, 2020
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In no way a ‘tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’, Pew is instead a kind of reverie, a wide-eyed spin on the Southern novel.

Book Review: “The Atomic Bomb on My Back” — Witness to Apocalypse

August 3, 2020
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Reading Sumiteru Taniguchi’s book brought back my memories of meeting a man who had witnessed the unimaginable.

Book Review: “Great Demon Kings” — A Comet Circling Gas Giants

July 30, 2020
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John Giorno was in the vanguard of what later became the herd: Ginsberg, Kerouac, Warhol, Buddhism, Burroughs, enlightenment, spiritual quests to India, unfettered sex, wild poetry, new technology, experimental forms of expression, queer politics, pot, speed, LSD —  all the household bric-a-brac of the counterculture.

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