Farha has thoughts on housing. Specifically, on the role of corporate financial investment in our homes.
She asks why human decency and regulatory oversight continue to fail the disadvantaged and the non-investor. What happens to a person, she posits, when they don’t have a place to call home?
Category: Non fiction reviews
A review of The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia by Robert Kolker
Part of what distinguishes this work from other medical sagas of neurodegenerative disorders is the author’s deft depiction of family members, with particular focus on the bonds between Jean’s children. Barb, for example –– long before the onset of her mother’s FTD symptoms –– perceived herself as “the blond, adorable little good-luck charm of eight older brothers and sisters[,] … most of [whom] seemed like rock stars,” Kolker writes.
A review of Jean Baudrillard: Critical Lives by Emmanuelle Fantin and Brian Nicol
Baudrillard is worth revisiting. And Fantin and Nicol’s brief but substantive volume is a welcome way to do so. They present the trajectory of his thought and career as clearly and accessibly as can be done with a writer whose meaning is often so–yes–elusive. Anyone provoked by the ongoing virtualization of contemporary life to want to grapple with his work would do well to start with their book.
Trapped Sentences: A review of Freak Lip: Essays of the Unsaid by Julia Cohen
A meditation on embodiment, desire, and the ineffability of language, Cohen braids scenic vignettes, text message transcripts, and literary theory with mesmerizing sensuality. She parses her insecurities covertly in iPhone transcripts where she narrates existential feelings, attachments, her own favorite body parts, and her dislike (the word “dick” is used) of Jonathan Franzen.
What Clever Friends: The Selected Letters of Jane Kenyon and Alice Mattison edited by Chad Wriglesworth
Their acute understanding of friendship’s importance in life fuels the collection, fuels and energizes readers. Kenyon’s and Mattison’s direct prose addressing their love, care and concern for one another outshines social media likes and emojis, but that, of course, relies on the near-outdated notion of relationship intimacy. The letters now live, as Mattison and Wriglesworth note, in university archives, bequeathed by Kenyon’s husband, poet Donald Hall.
Magickal Millenials: A review of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by Felix John Taylor
Felix John Taylor achieves a grand academic sweep of the field. His Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival is a work of prodigious scholarship, tracing in minute detail the origins, the rivalries, the infighting inherent to magickal team building.
A review of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
The book promises to speak to everyone but whether it does is a different question. Norman succeeds as a manifesto for designers, but falls short as a practical guide for everyone else because the examples he uses, the vocabulary within the guide, and proposed solutions to said designs are tailored to people with the power to change it – not the everyday people he claims to be writing for.
A review of The Badge Between Us by Terrence P. Dwyer
As a New York State Trooper, Terrence Dwyer spent more than two decades involved in criminal investigations. Now a university professor of legal studies at Western Connecticut State University and an attorney consulting on law enforcement issues and the author of Homeland Security Law: Issues and Analysis, Terrence Dwyer writes with real authority on the issues of crime and policing.
A review of The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin
As an undergraduate during those heady years Emily Eakin was caught up in the excitement. Her The Frenchmen, or My Life in Theory, part memoir and part history of ideas, is a lively look back at that time when critical theories largely imported from France seemed poised to make a clean sweep of American intellectual life.
We Bombed in New Haven; Alamogordo, New Mexico; in Hiroshima, too: A review of Trinity by Emily Seyl
Seyl, a science writer and editor at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s National Security Research Center, has organized a coffee table book to end all coffee table books. Trinity: An Illustrated History of the World’s First Atomic Test, replete with more than 300 carefully restored photographs, maps, blueprints, and formerly top-secret documents, goes where no book has gone before.