Critical Compendium

Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, by Dean Wareham

“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 era, “Black Postcards,” stings with loss for those of us who took part in it, whether as performers or as fans.” Read the review at Bloomberg.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 04.15.08 | Comments: None

The Good Rat, A True Story, by Jimmy Breslin

“When Jimmy Breslin resigned from newspaper writing in 2004 after roughly a half-century and countless thousands of column inches, it was ostensibly to devote more time to books. But there might have been another reason. Like a novelist, a great reporter needs his cast of characters — especially, for Breslin, the mobbed-up ones. “The Good Rat,” a book that combines personal anecdotes about the Mafia with the story of two really dirty Brooklyn cops, reminds us that by the time he quit, Breslin had lost his gangsters.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 03.05.08 | Comments: None

The Boy in the Trees, by Mary Swan

“In the prologue to Mary Swan’s first novel, a boy escapes a beating from his violent father by climbing a tree, where he carves is name and vows that he’ll grow up into a very different sort of man, “that he would find the life he was meant to have, somewhere far from this terrible place,” where “all would be well” and “people would know his name.” That name haunts “The Boys in the Trees.” William Heath keeps dreaming big; as a husband and father, he gets a version of the life he wants, then becomes famous for destroying it in an afternoon.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir | Posted 03.05.08 | Comments: None

About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir, by John Rechy

“About My Life and the Kept Woman,” Rechy’s audacious, occasionally charming, more often maddening memoir, tells the story of how he became the icon his Web site celebrates. Born on the Texas-Mexico border to Mexican parents (his father was half-Scottish), he grew up in El Paso (Rio Grande, Johnny Rio) — not on the wrong side of the tracks that divided the town’s poor from its wealthy, but close enough to feel their presence. Christened Juan, he became “Johnny” when a kindergarten teacher got tired of him jumping up every time she said the word “one” during a game.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 03.05.08 | Comments: None

Bill Mauldin: A Life Up Front, by Todd DePastino

“Until surprisingly late in World War II, Army cartooning consisted of gags about mean old drill sergeants and raw recruits on K.P. duty. Then came Bill Mauldin, an impish rifleman from the 180th Infantry Regiment, who volunteered as a cartoonist for The 45th Division News. On July 10, 1943, he stumbled ashore, pistol drawn, in the Allied invasion of Sicily and went on to fight in the Italian campaign while turning the raw material of the front into captioned panel cartoons, often at the expense of superiors in the rear. Mauldin listened to his fellow dogfaces in their foxholes and sketched quickly, sometimes rendering finished work on the back of whatever scrap he could find in the rubble.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 03.05.08 | Comments: None

Intern: A Doctor’s Initiation, by Sandeep Jauhar

“Autobiographical accounts of medical internships have become quite fashionable. The trajectory of these works is predictable: Idealistic and naive medical school graduates encounter inhumane conditions, leading them to become angry and resentful interns. Yet somehow, at the end of the internship, they emerge well trained and more human. The latest contributor to this genre is Sandeep Jauhar, who recounts his internship at New York Hospital. Jauhar’s year was surely eventful, full of dramatically ill patients, great saves and tragic outcomes.” Read the review at the Washington Post.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.27.08 | Comments: None

One Soldier’s War, by Arkady Babchenko, translated by Nick Allen

“There is certainly no more commanding a subject for a book than the trials of war – particularly when these events are experienced by young idealists. Libraries and bookstores alike hold shelves of such memoirs, each one of them trying to encapsulate the horrors of armed conflict. As a member of the Vietnam War generation, I have read my fair share of them. But few have ever hit me with the force and power of Arkady Babchenko’s new memoir of the conflicts in Chechnya, One Soldier’s War.” Read the review at the Christian Science Monitor.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.25.08 | Comments: None

Inheriting the Trade, by Thomas DeWolf

“Thomas DeWolf was 47 before he made a horrifying discovery: An ancestor of his, James DeWolf, was the head of the most successful slave-trading family in American history. The DeWolfs financed 88 voyages which carried about 10,000 enslaved Africans to the New World – and in the process became one of New England’s most wealthy and powerful families. Talk about having a skeleton in the closet. The only slightly mitigating factor was the fact that Thomas did not descend directly from James; James was instead the nephew of Thomas’s direct ancestor, who was a carpenter from Connecticut. But that bit of distance wasn’t enough to cancel out the shame now associated with the name DeWolf.” Read the review at the Christian Science Monitor.

Filed under: History, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.25.08 | Comments: None

Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I Want From Brooklyn to Hollywood with the Same Woman, the Same Dog and a Lot Less Hair, by David Goldberg

“To judge by his thoroughly enjoyable memoir, “Sit, Ubu, Sit,” Gary David Goldberg is the luckiest guy in the world. He grew up in a warm and loving family and somehow managed to succeed despite the lack of neuroses. He found the love of his life and has been with her about 40 years. And then he discovered a job he was good at and loved to do and made millions of dollars doing it.” Read the review at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.12.08 | Comments: None

In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood, by Andrew Motion

“In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood,” by Andrew Motion, the British poet laureate and noted biographer of Keats and Philip Larkin, has the expected circular form. Motion’s first chapter begins at the end of the story, when the poet is 17, where the last chapter will break off after Motion has gone back and recalled his life up to that point. But his story entails no dramatic psychological development or pivotal departure.” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.05.08 | Comments: None

Riding Toward Everywhere, by William T. Vollmann

“If trains, connoting the eternally expanding frontier, have long served as a potent symbol for our fair nation, then trainhopping represents an outlaw strain of the American dream. William T. Vollmann must know this, because in Riding Toward Everywhere, his part-memoir, part-report, full-on paean to trainhopping, he hardly goes five pages without affirming that dangerous, true Americanism he associates with his gonzo hobby.” Read the review at the Village Voice.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel | Posted 02.04.08 | Comments: None

Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography, by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe

“Regis Debray has led the fullest of lives, embroiled in ideology, controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained in the use of assault weapons with Fidel Castro; he trod the thankless Bolivian forests with Che Guevara and served nearly four years in jail for his trouble. In Chile he was taken up by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. Ten years later he became an adviser at the Elysée to François Mitterrand, his country’s only postwar socialist president. He is a revolutionary Third Worldist turned revisionist, turned Gaullist – his Gaullism a lament for the absence of credible leaders anywhere on the European horizon. He is, above all, a sceptic sorting through the ruins of his former world-historical ambitions, though from time to time the eyes of an unreconstructed optimist gleam behind the mask of the disabused older man.” Read the review at the London Review of Books.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 02.02.08 | Comments: None

Riding Toward Everywhere, by William T. Vollman

“Contempt for my privileged railroad follies may be warranted,” William T. Vollman concedes in the first chapter of “Riding Toward Everywhere” (HarperCollins, 288 pages, $26.95), his account of train-hopping in the contemporary American West. He knows that a fortunate man who does for kicks what a less fortunate man does out of desperation is suspect, and he wants us to know that he knows. But he also knows that riding the railcars as a recreational hobo “gives me pleasure and makes me braver,” and so he’s willing to risk seeming a “dilettante or a hypocrite” if his writing can do for us what his travels have done for him.” Read the review at the New York Sun.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel | Posted 01.22.08 | Comments: None

Full Circle: A Memoir, by Edith Kurzweil

“Edith Kurzweil has lived many lives and prevailed against tremendous odds. As an Austrian Jew, she was not meant to live at all; as a first-generation immigrant in America, she wasn’t expected to succeed; as a woman, who was also a 1950s-style wife and mother, she was not supposed to become a scholar in her own right. But Kurzweil refused to identify herself as a victim, choosing instead to view adversity as a useful challenge.” Read the review at the City Journal.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.18.08 | Comments: None

Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home, by Eduardo Machado and Michael Domitrovich

“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? I should have asked him directly. Instead, I spent the rest of my life looking for the answer.” “Tastes Like Cuba” deals with Machado’s struggle to come to terms with the painful and confusing contradictions of exile. It also has a lot of great Cuban recipes. (The garlic chicken with sour oranges is killer.)” Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Food, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.16.08 | Comments: None

My Life in France, by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme

‘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 the review at Small Spiral Notebook.

Filed under: Food, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.11.08 | Comments: None

Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir, by David Rieff

‘Swimming in a Sea of Death’ is Rieff’s brief record of how high priests of the body and blood sort — whether oncologists or monsignors — must so often disappoint. And how they disappointed his mother. In the end, neither science nor medicine, reason nor raw intellect, “avidity” for life nor her lifelong sense that hers was a special case — nothing could undo her death. Susan Sontag “died as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality.” And there is the sadness at the heart of Rieff’s testimony: that mothers die, as fathers do, regardless of what they or their children believe or disbelieve. It is our humanity that makes us mortal, not our creeds or their antitheses.’ Read the review at the Los Angeles Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.09.08 | Comments: None

Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill

‘Diana Athill is not just old, she is very old, in her 89th year as she wrote this, her fifth autobiographical book. We have very few accounts written from a perspective such as hers: deaf now, feet and legs making moving difficult, caring - at a time when she should be caring for herself - for her ailing and mostly bedridden companion, the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckford. She can tell us better than almost anyone what will be left to us as we approach dying, and death.’ Read the review at the London Telegraph.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.06.08 | Comments: None

This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor, by Susan Wicklund and Alan Kesselheim

‘In recent years there have been numerous murders and attempted murders of abortion providers, dozens of bombings, arsons, acid attacks, anthrax threats, kidnappings, and burglaries as well as less lethal but still chilling forms of harassment by abortion protesters. ‘The Common Secret’ indicates that while some protesters limit their actions to guilt-inducing misinformation and invective, some endorse - and commit - crimes up to and including homicide.’ Read the review at the California Literary Review.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.04.08 | Comments: None

Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story, by Frederik Peeters

‘Writing metaphorically about AIDS has often meant assembling armies of assassins and grim reapers: Randy Shilts’ classic history of the epidemic, And the Band Played On, opens with a section titled “Behold, a Pale Horse,” a reference to death’s steed in Revelation. In his graphic memoir, Blue Pills, Frederik Peeters’ symbol for infection is somewhat more benign.’ Read the review at the Washington City Paper.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 01.02.08 | Comments: None

There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew with Roy Abraham Varghese

‘Now, in a book written, according to its title page, “with” Roy Abraham Varghese - of whom more later - Flew tells the story of his “discovery of the divine.” This sounds like a victory for the faithful in the God wars: a welcome riposte to the atheist tomes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.’ Read the review at the New York Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction, Religion | Posted 12.24.07 | Comments: None

A View of the Ocean, by Jan de Hartog

‘As Dutch author Jan de Hartog fled German-occupied Holland during World War II, half a world away his elderly mother was trying to overcome the conditions of a prison camp in Java. “A View of the Ocean,” at times both wittily tender and savage in its honesty, gives de Hartog’s graceful, brief account of his parents’ life together and his experience of their deaths. Those familiar with de Hartog’s fictional works, including “Hollands Glorie” and “The Fourposter,” which set him apart as a bellwether of Dutch writing, will recognize his mastery of the storyteller’s art - above all, great tenderness toward his subject.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 12.20.07 | Comments: None

Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices and Life Lessons From the White House, by Egil “Bud” Krogh

‘Egil “Bud” Krogh worked for Richard Nixon, and went to prison trying to do his bidding. Yet unlike Nixon himself or Nixon’s other White House conspirators, Krogh did the unthinkable: He took full responsibility for his illegal actions and pleaded guilty to violating his victims’ civil rights.’ Read the review at the Christian Science Monitor.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 12.16.07 | Comments: 1 Comment

Psychogeography: Disentangling the Modern Conundrum of Psyche and Place, by Will Self, pictures by Ralph Steadman

‘The . . . pieces in this collection are quick, burnished, furious columns (Will) Self wrote for England’s Independent newspaper. The walk from London to New York is full of festive associations - spontaneous thoughts, images, old songs, and those long-ago days of debauch evoked by his passage - but in these shorter articles, with the friction that can come from word constraint, his riffs catch fire.’ Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed under: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.30.07 | Comments: None

The River Cottage Meat Book, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

‘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 apron) and his long, sometimes washed, hippyish brown hair (often pictured dangling in his face and over the dishes he is preparing), conveys a no-nonsense disregard for appearances and petty courtesies and an earnest commitment to a higher truth.’ Read the review at the New Yorker.

Filed under: Food, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.29.07 | Comments: None

Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine, by David Shulman

‘I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” This is the opening line of David Shulman’s powerful and memorable book, Dark Hope, a diary of four years of political activity in Israel and the Palestinian territories. It is a record of the author’s intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews, called Ta’ayush, an Arabic term for “living together” or “life in common.” The group was founded in October 2000, soon after the start of the second Palestinian intifada.’ Read the review at the New York Review of Books.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.28.07 | Comments: None

The Courage to Survive, by Dennis Kucinich

‘The book is not an outline of (Dennis Kucinich’s) career in politics or his platform - not directly anyway; it’s Kucinich, in his own words, going back to his poor, working-class roots. He has a remarkable memory of people and places; his family moved 21 times before he moved out at 17, and he remembers every address and neighborhood.’ Read the review at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.27.07 | Comments: None

The Rabbi’s Daughter, by Reva Mann

‘The only thing missing from the cover of “The Rabbi’s Daughter,” portraying the naked back of a woman whose body is covered only partially by a tallis, is Fabio on some mountain range, staring down longingly on the figure, while holding a tablet of the Ten Commandments. In this case, you can judge a book by its cover; such is the awkward juxtaposition of devout religiosity and soft-core porn inside Reva Mann’s memoir.”The Rabbi’s Daughter” follows what has become the standard form for the memoir - a dysfunctional family (in this case, self-absorbed mother, mercurial father and institutionalized sister) spawns one member who tells her tale first to a psychiatrist and then to an agent.’ Read the review at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.27.07 | Comments: None

The Hypocrisy of Disco: A Memoir by Clane Hayward

‘Disco doesn’t have much to do with anything in Clane Hayward’s memoir of her late-Seventies, peripatetic preteens, which were spent shuttling between a hippie mom, redneck dad, and anybody else with an open space - but not necessarily an open heart - in which Hayward could crash. The title comes from a drug-fueled monologue the girl overhears at a party.’ Read the review at the Austin Chronicle. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.22.07 | Comments: None

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

‘Steve Martin’s “Born Standing Up” is a spare, unexpectedly resonant remembrance of things past, the things in question being balloon animals and bunny ears, as well as the awkwardness Martin felt with his sullen father and the profound silliness he himself unleashed on stage.’ Read the review at Entertainment Weekly. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.21.07 | Comments: None

Clapton: The Autobiography by Eric Clapton

‘Clapton is God’ were the spray-painted words that spread like wildfire across London walls in the 1960s, but Eric Clapton’s autobiography exposes the very human weaknesses of the British singer and guitarist.” Read the review at the
Melbourne Age. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.20.07 | Comments: 1 Comment

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan

“Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan slams President Bush and today’s Republicans, while calling Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton ‘the smartest presidents’ he worked with, according to an advance copy of his upcoming book.” Read the review at CNN.com. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.20.07 | Comments: None

Boom!: Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today by Tom Brokaw

‘Tom Brokaw’s “Boom!” orchestrates a baby-boom epiphany. It stages a virtual reunion of America’s Class of 1968, accompanied by a full spectrum of opinions about the impact of that pivotal year. Although he describes his role in this process as that of moderator and class president, there’s more to it than that. Mr. Brokaw serves as a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, awakening to marvel at four decades’ worth of changes in the book’s dozens of interviewees. He also takes on the perilous job of wondering what it all means.’ Read the review at the New York Times. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: History, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.20.07 | Comments: None

Touch and Go: A Memoir by Studs Terkel

‘Studs Terkel is a living legend whose fame as an interviewer has reached far beyond Chicago, the city he has called home for eight decades. Normally, his books such as “Race, Working, and Division Street: America,” are collections of interviews with numerous people all gathered around a central subject. With his latest book, “Touch and Go: A Memoir” Terkel himself is the central subject.’ Read the review at Pop Matters. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.19.07 | Comments: None

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, Learning, and Tears at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn

‘Kathleen Flinn worked in the London office of an American software company. One day, when she returned from vacation, her boss asked to meet her at a nearby hotel. The company was downsizing, he told her. She was out of a job . . . . So, at age 36, she fulfilled a long-held dream and started studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. The full course cost over $26,000. In addition she had to buy equipment and pay for living expenses - roughly her entire life savings.’ Read the review at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.18.07 | Comments: 1 Comment

Bigger Than Life: a Murder, a Memoir by Dinah Lenney

‘UCLA adjunct professor Dinah Lenney has hyped Bigger Than Life, a Murder, a Memoir, as literary nonfiction. Focusing on the abduction and subsequent murder of her wealthy father, this book can better be described as an ingeniously designed autobiographical novel. It offers far too many daring hypothetical liberties to pass for authentic nonfiction.’ Read the review at the Omaha Reader. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.18.07 | Comments: None

Ticket to Exile by Adam David Miller

‘When Adam David Miller was 19, he committed an unforgivable trespass. He typed a note that read “I would like to know you better” on his used Underwood typewriter and passed it to a girl he had a crush on. She’d smiled at him but he didn’t even know her name. She worked in a dime store, he worked in a shoe repair shop. She was white, he was black. He was accused of attempted rape and locked up. The town was Orangeburg, S.C., during the Depression. As Miller recounts in his memoir, “Ticket to Exile,” he was no Rosa Parks trying to kick off the bus boycott. “I had no intention of challenging the social order by this one act” writes Miller. “I had no concept called ’social order.” Read the review at the San Francisco Chronicle. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.18.07 | Comments: 1 Comment

Slash by Slash with Anthony Bozza

‘In the rock-lit sweepstakes, Mötley Crüe’s oral history, “The Dirt,” set a new standard back in 2001 with its picaresque tales of nonstop debauchery. So “Slash,” the autobiography of the former lead guitarist for the dissolute Guns N’ Roses, was awaited with heightened, morbid curiosity. It largely delivers, particularly on the substance-abuse front. A set piece in which the naked, hallucinating musician tries to escape coke-induced “Predators” is destined to become a drug-porn classic.’ Read the review at Time Out New York. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.18.07 | Comments: None

Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found by Jan Wong

‘Imagine you were trying to find someone you had met briefly 30 years ago, in a country of 1.3 billion people that is going through the most rapid change in its history. You do not know what has happened to that someone. But you have haunting memories of a person you wronged. You have to find her. It is like a detective story; the trail is faint, the leads are few, but a lot is at stake. That is the daunting task facing Jan Wong. Wong was The Globe and Mail’s correspondent in Beijing between 1988 and 1994, but before that had been at Beijing University as a starry-eyed youthful Maoist at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Trying to be more zealous than the zealous, she denounced a student she hardly knew. The girl, Yin, had contacted her about the possibility of going to the United States, a thought-crime. Yin was expelled. But in 2003, Wong musters the courage to go to Beijing and try to find her.’ Read the review at the Toronto Globe and Mail. Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.18.07 | Comments: None

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories by Katha Pollitt

‘Katha Pollitt is known as a good old-fashioned feminist and leftist columnist for The Nation, as well as a prize-winning poet. Her most recent collection of essays, "Learning to Drive," establishes her as an affecting memoirist as well. A collection of witty reportage on the vicissitudes of a post–World War II child of left-wing parents, the book is also a reminder of a lost New York, a vanished generation, and the gentle persuasive power of memory itself.’ Read the review at the New York Review of Books.

Filed under: Essays, Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.12.07 | Comments: 1 Comment

Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times as a Weatherman by Cathy Wilkerson

‘When Bill Ayers published "Fugitive Days" in 2001, his memoir of life as a leader of the Weather Underground received a lot of attention, as might be expected. But one commentary in particular went beyond the familiar bromides about ’60s idealism, countercultural extremism, and the lure of violence. It appeared in Z Magazine, a leftish journal that usually manages to be both strident and soporific - though in this case the editors had a bit of luck, for they got hold of a review of Ayers by one of his peers from the Underground, ex-fugitive Cathy Wilkerson. Wilkerson, who is now a schoolteacher in New York City, had survived when the pipe bombs her comrades were building in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded . . . . Now Wilkerson has published her own account of the experiences and decisions leading to that terrible morning.’ Read the review at Newsday.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.12.07 | Comments: None

The Tecate Journals: Seventy Days on the Rio Grande by Keith Bowden

‘In the winter of 2004 Laredo, Texas, writer Keith Bowden packed up a change of clothes, a sleeping bag, chewing tobacco, some sardines, instant oatmeal, crackers, beans, tortilla flour and cheese to make quesadillas, and a Rubbermaid cooler full of Tecate, a beerlike substance manufactured in Mexico. Thus outfitted he set out to explore, by mountain bike, canoe, raft and shank’s mare, every foot of the Rio Grande, 1,260 miles of it, from El Paso to the Gulf.’ Read the review at the Dallas Morning News.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.12.07 | Comments: None

How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, From the Board to the Boardroom By Garry Kasparov

‘Self-help books are, as a rule, like New Year’s resolutions: full of optimism but quickly forgotten. The Petrosian story is the most memorable anecdote in (Garry) Kasparov’s largely unmemorable tome, which reads like one of those celebrity books whose profitability is inversely proportional to its literal thickness and figurative depth.’ Read the review at the Moscow Times.

Filed under: Memoir, Nonfiction | Posted 11.10.07 | Comments: None