To illustrate the range of the book, one chapter looks very specifically at sacrifices and different kinds of compensation, another at how to aim for decision-friendly positions, where there are clear, straightforward plans and the moves are relatively easy to come by.
A review of First Light by Kate Fagan
The grammatical syntax is also inflected, though not enough to lose the coherency. Instead, the conjunction of familiarity and distortion provides a cognitive dissonance that, mingled with the lovely imagery, is simultaneously pleasing and intellectually tricky.
A review of Somebody to Love by Parker Longwood
The writer took this story and gave it body – breathed life into it. The questions weren’t left unanswered and I personally was proud of Claire for her bravery and belief that to find her roots – her story was important. Longwood shows that clearly. She tells Claire’s story beautifully.
Death Ends A Holiday: Julia Murat’s film Found Memories
Are they happy or unhappy? Are they afraid or resigned? Are any of them ready to die? The simplicity of the lives of the people in the village gives them a dignified, mysterious quality verging on myth: can they stay alive forever, simply because they choose to? The film achieves its power honestly, plainly, slowly, but power—and finally charm—it does have.
Labor Class Conflict and Interracial Friendship: Edge of the City, starring Sidney Poitier and John Cassavetes, with Ruby Dee and Jack Warden
The city in the film is large, but the area that we see most is small, that of men who work with their bodies—and yet the tensions among them are those known to society at different levels, in many countries. What is the ultimate standard of value? What is the ideal for maturity; and what is the basis of loyalty; and what are the requirements of justice?
A review of Glow by Jessica Maria Tuccelli
Tuccelli did not take the easy way out with writing this novel. Crafting such a complicated storyline is difficult enough; allowing the characters to tell their story in their native dialect is even riskier. Glow is unlike any novel I’ve ever read before, and it offers an intense view of an often-overlooked area of the United States during a very tumultuous time period.
A review of James Joyce: A Life by Edna O’Brien
Though O’Brien’s Joyce is a flawed character indeed, often abusing others with a self-confidence that borders on narcissism, he remains both fascinating, and oddly likeable. For those of us, like O’Brien, who are deeply in Joyce’s literary debt for what he’s created, who can’t imagine the world of literature without the linguistic play his writing has allowed, this is a joyful book, full of fun, interest and great imagination. I suspect that Joyce himself would have approved.
A review of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
I don’t think any of the characters emerge as really unique individuals. In the case of Rudkus, I get the feeling that he is deliberately being put into as many different situations as possible, the better to elucidate all the abuses of the system. It did not seem likely, as I was reading, that one individual would really to through all of this … and the catalogue of horrors almost slips into parody at times, things being so bleak in so many different ways.
Flowers for Nat: David Murray Cuban Ensemble Plays Nat King Cole En Espanol
There is strong ensemble playing in the downbeat, sad “No Me Platiques,” in which the saxophone blares and also creates small, intricate patterns; and an emotional intensity emerges, with long, plaintive saxophone lines near the end. “Black Nat,” the one song David Murray wrote for the collection, mostly fits with the other music here, and has a lot of energy, though its wildness seems a bit beyond Cole’s customary cool control.
Bright, Dark Herald: Concerto in One Movement, and Symphony in E Minor by Florence Beatrice Price, performed by the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble
I suppose that I was surprised by that antique quality—a particular sweetness, a setting of the strings—as Florence Beatrice Price is an African-American artist, and I often associate that with immediacy, modernity. In fact, I can hear in her concerto a melody that sounds familiar, possibly bearing some relation to what one might hear in the American songbook of the twentieth-century’s first half: something beautiful and firm but perhaps too accessible, too slight.