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home authors titles dates links about "Read at whim!" – Randall Jarrell26 may 2012
The latest kick-ass teenage girl rescues world from totalitarian dystopian regime novel that I've read is Tahereh Mafi's Shatter Me, an exciting if preposterous exercise in Young Adult fantasy. read more
25 may 2012
Until I read Charles Lachman's Secret Life, I subscribed to the received view of the famous sex scandal that nearly scuttled Grover Cleveland's 1884 Presidential campaign. Cleveland himself never denied fathering a child by Maria Halpin; he simply said (or strongly implied) that their affair was consensual and that he'd behaved as well as a gentleman should. His cronies insinuated that Halpin had behaved worse. The picture of her that has come down in biographies is that of a vengeful scorned woman who drove Cleveland nuts and eventually went nuts herself. Lachman, drawing on long-buried archival material, strongly questions this narrative. read more
24 may 2012
There is a lot of scene-setting in Henry Chang's Year of the Dog, but the setting is skillful and the scene is interesting, so the novel doesn't pall in the process. Things degenerate into a general inhumanity that seems out of place for the novel's date of composition, 2008 – and no wonder, because the novel is set quite a bit earlier, in the winter of 1993-94, when New York was a more dangerous place by several quanta. In fact, the whole world is a dangerous and depressing place in Year of the Dog, and there's no possible way to set it right: the forces of evil are too insidious and too widespread (and many of them are within us). All we can hope for is a little respite once in a while when the bad guys concentrate on killing one another. read more
23 may 2012
Rin Tin Tin is one strange story. "The narrative had begun to curlicue and twist into a slightly cracked comedy," says Susan Orlean of the process of researching the book. "I myself began to feel like I was getting a little unhinged" (283). read more