Archive of: Bookmarks
| Title | Issue | |
|---|---|---|
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Light YearsLight Years is both an incandescent and an unsentimental portrait of the relationships between men and women, of the ways we support and defeat each other. If it’s the first work of James Salter you read, I feel safe in predicting it will not be the last. |
April 2013 |
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The Yellow BirdsBefore two Virginia boys deploy for war, one promises the other’s mother that he will see to her son’s safe return, a promise he knows he’s unable to keep as soon as it’s uttered and one whose folly will be revealed tragically by the novel’s end. |
March 2013 |
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Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny StuffThere’s a good chance you’re reading this column in February, and if there’s a month that requires a good laugh, it’s our shortest one. That’s why it’s the perfect time to pick up this collection of the incomparable Calvin Trillin’s best humor writing; a book that’s already been honored with the Thurber Prize for American Humor. |
February 2013 |
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My Favorite Books of 2012If we’ve connected on Twitter or Facebook, you know this column isn’t the only place I’m reviewing books. Annually, one of those other publications asks me to compile a list of my 10 favorites of the year. For the first time, I’m sharing that list (five titles each of fiction and nonfiction) with Harrisburg Magazine’s readers. |
January 2013 |
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Speaking of FaithIn the same civil, generous spirit that characterizes her probing interviews, Tippett spends a considerable portion of the book wrestling with some of the “big questions” – the conflict between science and religion, fundamentalism, social justice and the problem of evil. And she's determined to change Americans' perception of Islam. |
December 2012 |
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Day For NightIt’s always thrilling to watch a skilled author construct a daring narrative that defies our expectations as readers. Frederick Reiken has written two well-received, if fairly conventional, novels, The Odd Sea and The Lost Legends of New Jersey. His latest ranges over half a century and across locations from a Florida swamp, to World War II era Lithuania, to a nursing home in New Jersey, to the Dead Sea, as he enlists 10 narrators to offer their tales, almost in the manner of relay racers handing a baton from one to the other. |
November 2012 |
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Fire and Rain:As a 19 year-old college sophomore, I wore out the vinyl albums of the musicians whose memorable year of 1970 is profiled by Rolling Stone contributing editor David Browne in this fast-paced and entertaining book. |
October 2012 |
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The Storytelling AnimalDrawing on an array of disciplines far removed from traditional literary studies – from neuroscience to psychology to biology to genetics – Jonathan Gottschall argues persuasively that our minds “yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.” |
September 2012 |
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No One is Here Except All Of UsNovelist John Gardner wrote that it’s the job of the fiction writer to immerse her reader in a “vivid and continuous dream.” By that demanding standard, Ramona Ausubel’s first novel –an engrossing fable set in a tiny Romanian village whose inhabitants devise an imaginative plan to evade capture by the Nazis — is an unqualified success. |
July 2012 |
