Book Reviews Archive
Review: AFTER THE DAM by Amy Hassinger
But although Dam contains intriguing traces of family saga and love story, there is nothing formulaic about this layered novel, an often lyrical elegy to the natural world that raises environmental and feminist questions about boundaries of property and self, the reconciliation of love and principles, and the limits
Laurence Sterne’s Beating Hearts
Though it’s less travel writing and more personal memoir, Laurence Sterne’s A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY contains one of the most authentic, challenging descriptions of why one might journey from their home in the first place.
Blood at the Root of a Rural Georgia County
Patrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America. Published last September, the book chronicles the racial history of Forsyth County, Georgia, going back to the Civil War and ending with it being fully cemented as an Atlanta suburb today.
Victory is Hers! Three Contest-Winning Chapbooks by Women
This month, I read three award-winning chapbooks—which happen all to have been written by women.
Review: IN THE GREAT GREEN ROOM: THE BRILLIANT AND BOLD LIFE OF MARGARET WISE BROWN by Amy Gary
In the Great Green Room is an eminently readable biography. The book sheds light on Brown’s creative process and unlikely sources of inspiration. Gary sheds new light on how Goodnight Moon was made, and in doing so we appreciate it even more.
Review: WHEREAS By Layli Long Soldier
Whereas Layli Long Soldier Graywolf; March 7, 2017 120 pp; $16 Buy: paperback Few Americans seem to know much about the Indian Occupation of Alcatraz, and fewer still are acquainted with the Occupation’s “Proclamation,” a masterful document that deploys the language, diction, and vocabulary of unfair treaties and paternalism
Not-Quite States
Doug Mack is not your average travel writer. In his new book, The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA, Mack goes to the five American colonies, shedding stark light on the politics and history of the mainland.
A Novel of Mania: THE TIME OF MIRACLES by Borislav Pekić
Borislav Pekić was born in Montenegro and spent his youth in Belgrade. At eighteen, he was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor for political activity. His only reading material was a donated bible, his only paper was toilet tissue, and his only pens were the teeth of
Review: IN FULL VELVET by Jenny Johnson
For her debut collection In Full Velvet, poet Jenny Johnson's address begins with “Thank you,” and it is radical, as if a muse might peer over the edge of her throne and say, “My, those are words I have not heard for some time.”
Exploring personal politics in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The sinister Jean Brodie continues to bewitch: decades after the publication of the novel that bears her name, the myth of her humanism persists; she has long been shorthand for a strain of idealism and independent thought that she never represented in the first place. The Prime of Miss