But many of these pieces are in fact exceptionally good and the poetry, although Gaiman makes rather little of his poetry, is very good. He forthrightly asserts that it is meant to be read aloud and he measures its quality…
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A review of Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, edited by Peter Y. Sussman
The funeral industry played into her hands beautifully through the inability of its spokesmen to keep their mouths shut. Each outburst of strained rhetoric from these provided Decca with endless material for subsequent articles in the most widely read magazines…
A review of The Way It Wasn’t by James Laughlin
The cover is a beauty with an autographed picture of the author and the title in typescript below it. The inside matches the outside and consists of a generous selection of appropriate or simply beautiful photographs and artwork. It is…
A review of The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan
The Unknown Terrorist is being sold as a Trojan Horse of a thriller masquerading the seriousness of the societal critique it provides, but even that statement is a Trojan Horse. At the core of this novel is a nihilism so bleak, that it makes even the horror of the terrorist act, of murder and suicide, seem minor in comparison. It’s almost the complete opposite of the joyous affirmative humour which underpins Gould’s Book of Fish, and except for the occasional forays into stunning prose, it’s hard to believe this is the same author.
Looks Nothing Like Jesus: The Killers’ Sam’s Town
Light percussion, then a speeding beat and swirling music, then tiny techno beats, followed by heavier drumming and a voice and lyric lines about the inertia of others and the singer’s sense of his own energy and destiny begin the…
Images of Women: Beyonce’s B’Day
Beyonce, like Diana Ross before her, knows of the many women performers who have preceded her own arrival on the public stage, and has offered compliments to them: and Beyonce is trying to place herself in a flattering locale within that tradition and that ambition involves manners and methods dangerous, enriching, exciting, and easy to misunderstand.
Masculine, Nurturing: Ben Harper’s Both Sides of the Gun
In a song co-written with Danny Kalb, “More Than Sorry,” Ben Harper sings “Goodbye hasn’t been so good to me” and “We all think that we’re right” and “Too many people say goodbye before they say hello,” and concludes, “What…
A review of Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
I think of German writers – unlike Musil or Joseph Roth, both of Austria – as hard and gnarly with long involved sentences and a gloomy outlook. Kehlmann’s lightness of touch is exceptional. He is a quietly witty writer with…
The Ordinary Lives of Intelligent People: Belle and Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister
Boredom and pleasure and violence seem the boundaries of the experiences described in several songs. A girl in “If You’re Feeling Sinister” is described thusly: “She was into S&M and bible studies.” (It is to laugh—or weep: the contradictions are less immoral than merely telling: and they tell of contradictory human impulses so strong that each aspect cannot destroy the other but may reinforce somehow the other.)
A review of Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott
Scott has written a splendid book. It’s clever, fairly glitters with cleverness, but it also better than that, and is a book that will appeal to every perceptive reader. Reviewed by Bob Williams Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott Back…