Criticalcompendium
Book Reviews

“It is hard to imagine where American culture would be today without the contributions of Hitler and Stalin — that is, without the thousands of creatively gifted refugees who fled these murderers. A good many cultural historians and writers have explored this meaty subject from different angles since Anthony Heilbut’s 1983 landmark, “Exiled in Paradise” [...]

“I Like Food, Food Tastes Good,’ (is) a compendium of recipes submitted by the likes of Mick Cooke from Belle and Sebastian, Sam Fogarino of Interpol, and RJ “RJD2? Krohn. The book takes its title from a Descendents song, and it approaches its topic matter with a similarly unpretentious aura of nonchalant cool.’ Read the [...]

“Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (is) a British food celebrity. He is forty-two, principally a journalist and television host by trade, who wears inexpensive horn-rimmed glasses so familiar to his British audience that they are now a piece of instant anti-branding branding. The look, like his dress (muddy Wellington boots, soiled linen jacket, the mess of the occasional [...]

“(Since Kate) Colquhoun is a writer of lively detail rather than argument - you might say her book is too busy stuffing its face, one course after another, to pause for conversation - the question of why Britain developed such a poor cuisine is never fully addressed.’ Read the review at the International Herald Tribune.

“Without her we wouldn’t have Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, or the Jamie Oliver. We wouldn’t have the French cooking bible, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Without her, Bon Appetite would not be in the pop culture lexicon. My Life in France tells the story of how the inspiration epicure, Julia Child, was born.’ Read [...]

“In his eccentric and often affecting memoir “Tastes Like Cuba,” Machado, a noted Cuban-American playwright, tells the story of his rootless, self-invented life, using food as his connecting thread. After his grandfather boasts that his arroz con pollo “will taste just like Cuba,” Machado thinks: “How do you make a meal taste like a place? [...]

“Don’t be surprised if you’re feeling queasy after reading Frederick Kaufman’s brief but comprehensive examination of our collective guts. The glut of information within—and what it all means to (and for) America—is enough to make even the strongest stomach turn.As a country, we are preoccupied with food. Hundreds of diet books line shelves, while the [...]

“Shooting War,’ writer Anthony Lappé and illustrator Dan Goldman’s glossy, all-color graphic novel, is (a) political satire focused on the business of corrupt journalism, wars on terror (specifically the war in Iraq before it smoothly transitions into the war in Iran), and networks shaking hands with governments.’ Read the review at the Austin Chronicle.

“Years before its publication, Alan Moore described “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier” as “not my best comic ever, not the best comic ever, but the best thing ever. Better than the Roman civilisation, penicillin … and the human nervous system. Better than creation. Better than the big bang. It’s quite good.” The third [...]

“The comics collected in this book range fairly far and wide, but the strong center of gravity is plaintive tales of everyday life, set in the present, and usually about the social groups that comic artists themselves belong to. The appeal of such work is its emotional directness - in this age of highly branded, [...]

“It lurks in the background of our childhood imagination, now and again roaring back in adulthood to remind us of possibilities. A map of the world, that fixture in elementary classrooms, has always been a book masquerading as a flat piece of paper. Like layers of the earth for geologists, maps offer a glinting sample [...]

“Dean Wareham was the guitarist for Galaxie 500, a much-loved indie trio whose droning atmospherics and oblique lyrics owed as much to Dadaist prose as they did to the Velvet Underground. The indie-rock world of the late ’80s and early ’90s now seems as distant as only the recent past can. Wareham’s memoir of the [...]

“Masumoto is an American farmer whose family arrived from Japan in 1898 and today embodies a century long history of farming “the other California,” the agriculturally rich Central Valley . . . As literary essays, Masumoto’s letters are occasionally uneven. His unwavering adherence to the letter format sometimes adds an “aw, shucks” clumsiness, especially in [...]

“In 1949, Noël Coward wrote to his childhood friend Esme Wynne, who was trying to get him to find God: “My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noël [...]

“Generations from now, what will your personal writings reveal about you and the time in which you lived? Would you want them preserved, or destroyed? Former first lady Martha Washington destroyed most of her letters from George. Mother Teresa had not wanted her letters to see daylight. Fortunately, the illustrious Adams family of Massachusetts has [...]

“Richard Greene (no relation), a professor of English at the University of Toronto, has edited a collection of Graham Greene’s letters. The novelist once estimated that he wrote 2000 letters a year, and he lived to be 86: publishing all those letters would have taken decades. The editor has sifted through Greene’s correspondence and come [...]

“The superbly edited and extraordinarily modestly priced Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron is an invaluable resource with which to find out exactly how a promising early nineteenth-century author was marketed and promoted by his entrepreneurial young publisher, and how this most competitive of writers, in turn, kept his finger on the literary pulse.” [...]

“Aldous Huxley and Maria Nys met at Garsington in 1916. He was in his early twenties, she still in her teens. She was exceptionally attractive – as her photographs show. They married in 1918 and lived together happily and more or less inseparably until her death in 1955. That event is recorded with a mixture [...]

“On Aug. 11, 1941, as massed German armies were advancing on Moscow, Colonel-General Franz Halder, chief of the Nazi general staff, wrote in his diary that “we have underestimated the Soviet colossus.” Since the German invasion had begun, some seven weeks before, the unprepared Soviets had been steadily pushed back toward Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, [...]

“Amazon.com lists more than 36,000 books on the American Civil War, and my guess is that most of them depict battles and heroes, and describe wartime deaths as noble and tragic. Drew Gilpin Faust’s “This Republic of Suffering” does something different. It’s a shattering history of the war, focusing exclusively on death and dying — [...]

“Sometimes you see it said in a fiction review that the geographical setting is as much of a character in the novel as, well, the characters. It seems this observation can be extended to nonfiction, as well, for in James Campbell’s superb “The Ghost Mountain Boys,” the island of New Guinea is one of the [...]

“In his “New History,” Barry Strauss tells the story of the Trojan War from the very beginning. Paris, the “cosmopolitan prince” from Troy, abducted the unhappy Helen in Sparta, not for love but for political reasons. Strauss sees the adulterous couple as “less like Romeo and Juliet than Juan and Eva Péron.” Helen escaped Sparta, [...]

“John Ferling toiled for years in relative obscurity at West Georgia University, churning out at least nine books, dozens of articles, and uncounted reviews, almost all dealing with war and politics in eighteenth-century America, the same subjects that have brought fame and riches to Joseph Ellis, David Hackett Fischer, and David McCullough. His prose may [...]

“Mask Market’ is the (Andrew) Vachss’ 16th book starring Burke, “a two-time felony loser” and abuse survivor who works this other side of the city for those that need to rent his code of ethics, allowing themselves the illusion of not soiling themselves. The novel opens with Burke having recently recovered from being shot in [...]

“In the absence of something genuinely profound,’ says a character in “The Art Thief,” “always say something quotable.” There’s a whole lot of quoting going on in Noah Charney’s debut novel, a pleasant if diluted stew of police procedural, art history and mystery writing.’ Read the review at the Charleston Post and Courier.

“Here’s a very human story with the plot nearly buried among the twists and turns of the characters’ lives. A heavy hitter from the Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrives in a seaside village armed with new evidence she thinks will finally nail a slippery crook. Entwined are subplots about child abuse, pregnancy, career sacrifice, unrequited [...]

“Zugzwang, Ronan Bennett informs us in the beginning, is a German term that in chess is used to describe a position in which a player “is obliged to move, but every move only makes his position even worse.” Something similar can be said of the state Otto Spethmann finds himself in. A psychoanalyst, Spethmann is [...]

“After the enormous commercial success of Kate Mosse’s “Grail gripper”, Labyrinth, no doubt many readers are eagerly awaiting the pleasures of her next book. When building a brand (and that will certainly be how her publishers now think of Mosse), it’s vital not to veer wildly away from the qualities that have already proven popular [...]

“Activist and cemetery caretaker Oliver Stone has removed his tent across from the White House - at the insistence of the Secret Service. However, his sign of protest proclaiming “I want the truth” remains. He still has a bone to pick with the United States government, a huge one. And it has a lot to [...]

“The title of this book, “City of Fire,” promises a great deal of suspense, tension and do-or-die action especially when factoring in the story setting of Los Angeles, a loony-tunes city full of bizarre and exotic plot possibilities. Unfortunately, despite being competently written by Robert Ellis, the murder mystery does not deliver. Making the situation [...]

“As ever more implausibly ghoulish serial killers flay, chainsaw, and cannibalize their way through contemporary crime lit, the creepiest villain to amble along in recent months is a drab middle-aged nurse named Solana Rojas. The wily evildoer in “T Is for Trespass,” Sue Grafton’s 20th Kinsey Millhone mystery, Solana is loathsome precisely because she’s not [...]

“There’s something oddly unsatisfying about tales of Australian spies. Perhaps I’m just guilty of some kind of cultural cringe, but any espionage that requires a meeting in a coffee shop in Canberra’s “Civic centre” lacks a necessary frisson of interest. Trenchcoats by Lake Burley Griffin suggest porn-trading politicians rather than Cold War capers to me. [...]

“Because he’s a damn good writer James Lee Burke knows how to keep a plot going from start to finish with no loose ends or out-of-the-blue surprises that amateurishly attempt to explain and finish off a narrative. He easily weaves several ancillary situations into the story line of “The Tin Roof Blowdown.” These are of [...]

“Geoffrey Household’s spy classic, “Rogue Male,” was published in 1939 by Little, Brown. A new copy sold for $2. The New York Times book critic wrote: “We haven’t read as exciting a man-hunt as this one in years. There are scenes here - mostly underground, literally as well as figuratively - you won’t soon forget.” [...]