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.
Category: Non fiction reviews
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.
A review of The Land and Its People by David Sedaris
While The Land and its People may not mark a drastic departure from Sedaris’ previous musings and ruminations, it is remains funny and engaging while, at the same time, reflecting the current state of the world in quietly amusing ways. The book begins abruptly, as if in the middle of a conversation, and ends in almost the same way, leaving the impression that it could go on and on without exhausting the reader’s appetite for his remarkable storytelling.
Literature & Me, a review essay
I’ll admit, it ruined an enjoyable afternoon’s reading to discover that romantic notions about authorship are greater villains than late-capitalistic conglomerates with their bottom lines, unexplained cancellation of contracts, shrunken advances, nonexistent promotional plans for most books, and so on.
A review of Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
If memoir is your ticket. If you’re a sucker for a life story that only uses the crayon colours it loves best. If you wonder what kind of woman reared the author of The God of Small Things (1997 Booker winner) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017 longlist), there’s an autobiography on the shelves, calling your name. It’s time to run, not walk, to the library or bookstore and snag your copy. Tell your partner and kids you’re going offline for the next three hundred pages.
A review of Why Do I Feel This Way by Laura Mayer
Mayer, an occupational therapist, healer, and writer based in Arizona, New York and Florence, Italy, practices healing based on personal experience. In her book she lauds the relevance of epigenetics, a relatively new approach to gene expression emphasizing the hitherto under-appreciated role of historical and behavioral components of pain, illness and suffering. Components which she and other authors increasingly demonstrate as vitally relevant to the diagnosis and management of disease.
A review of Ground to Stand On by Sandra Djwa
Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend.) Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate.