Interview with Jackie French

In this fascinating and extensive interview, the author of Pharaoh (to mention just one of Jackie French’s extensive titles), talks about the writing and researching of Pharaoh, the critical importance of history and books to children, the thread that connects all her work, her unlikely hero, on maintaining passion in life, a big preview of her next book, and lots more.

A review of Pharaoh by Jackie French

This is an exciting, easy to read, and edifying book which is suitable for all ages. The combination of an excellent, stirring plot, sympathetic and well developed characters, a hint of romance, and a positive, well researched historical context for a critical and surprisingly relevant period in humanity’s makes this a winner.

New Orleans Love: Harry Connick Jr.’s Chanson du Vieux Carré

The Connick song “Ash Wednesday” has more of a sense of adventure than one imagines a religious observance to have, but that may be the atmosphere of the city, and the nature of the album Chanson du Vieux Carré, on which Connick plays piano throughout, an album that has charm and solidity and more of a cinematic quality than most of the other jazz recordings I have listened to in the last year.

A Generation’s Work Continues: Neil Young’s Living With War

The false intelligence, the expectation of military success, and the early sense of triumph and victory have given way to death, the bodies returning home with little ceremony, to increasing losses on both sides, to grief and bad memories, all recounted in Young’s “Shock and Awe,” with its propulsive, shimmery percussion, jangling guitar notes, and grief-filled horn, a song in which Young recalls, “We had a chance to change our mind, but somehow wisdom was hard to find.

Dissent is the Highest Form of Democracy: Michael Franti and Spearhead’s Yell Fire!

Yell Fire! is another chapter in Michael Franti’s career, another attempt to do work that expresses his personal sense of the world and his place in it. He is someone who does not quite fit common expectations: he is not selling our own greed and desire for glamour back to us, nor, though young and handsome, is he selling sex to us, or stupidity or hatred. He has invested in mind, sensitivity, and public concern; and his reward will be our awareness and our active—or activist—response.

Here We Are, On Earth Together: Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book

Talking Book is a work of consciousness and distinctive musicality. In liberating his own talent, Stevie Wonder enlarged the possibilities for African-American musical talent, and those inspired by it: with boyish charm and manly confidence, Stevie Wonder explored intimate relationships, and political situations, and he became one of the most significant artists of his generation.

A review of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

As a feat of storytelling, though, The Ministry of Fear is both instructive (e.g. for the way certain significant events happen “off-stage” and the way in which certain characters – Prentice being one – act as a lodestone or lightening rod for the emotional force of the story) and impressive. This is a minor work, then, but a novel with its own strengths and satisfactions; and it is an interesting precursor of much of what was to follow.