It would be tempting to look around at the extreme and growing polarities, and persistent poverty so evident in the world today, and shrug. Flannery doesn’t do that, and in fact quite clearly eshews such negative “self-fulfilling prophecies”. Instead he offers a range of solutions from electric vehicles, smart grids, and satellite surveillance of environmental trangressions, along with the suggestion that the ultimate answer lies in governments being willing to cede power for the common good.
A review of Listen to This by Alex Ross
His piece on Björk has the advantage of the concrete and the seeable. There are mysteries here but they are the mysteries of the tangible, the creative mind grappling with and solving problems. It is a stark contrast with the murkiness of his piece on Schubert.
A review of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My enjoyment of the literary feel of the book and the tension – drew me in and carried me to about a third in, when the plot began to sag with repetition and sameness. It was then I noticed the Atwood literary formula, ie never use one metaphor when two or three will do, in the same paragraph.
A review of New Kinds of Smart: How the Science of Learnable Intelligence is Changing Education by Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton
The discussions of meta-cognition and self-efficacy were interesting, and also the notion of ‘communities of practice’: if you ignite fervour for learning and it ceases to be simply ‘being taught’, then you’re on a roll.
A review of The Grease Monkey’s Tale by Paul Burman
There’s no easy solution or happy ending. Instead there are motifs and stories that lead to other stories and characters that are built upon other characters. The ultimate journey here isn’t to a clean truth – there’s no such thing in The Grease Monkey’s Tale. Instead we end up with the strong sense that everything is story – that life itself between the pages or beyond the book is just another story: “the sound of riverbed pebbles chattering and grinding against the hushing of fast water. Hypnotic.”
A review of Mine-Haha, or, On the Bodily Education of Young Girls by Frank Wedekind
Wedekind well knows that extreme emotion represents a danger to its possessor as well as to those around him or her. It can easily be converted into (self) destructive rage. His characters in these two stories are respectively a convict and a prostitute, hence he’s not averse either to embracing the downtrodden and the wretched.
A review of The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction By Dean Young
Throughout, there’s a lot of luminous polemic, a slue of terrific poems (Man Ray’s ‘Untitled’ was a new one on me), a bevy of insights about art and poetry. If you are looking for a classy thought-provoking rant, if you want something to stir and shake you up and perhaps inspire you to start writing poems (if you don’t already) then The Art of Recklessness is prescribed.
A review of A Stranger Like You by Elizabeth Brundage
Layered over and between each other, these passages of inner thoughts, often told in present tense, second person, lend kaleidoscopic views to the story, hopping back and forth through time and focusing on the unique angle seen by each character.
A review of Best Bet by Laura Pedersen
Pedersen revisits a character who has many of the same insecurities and dilemmas as the rest of us. Hallie is in that awkward, post-college stage—trying to cope with the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood as best she can, while admitting that she’s not ready for any of it!
A review of Reading Modernist Poetry by Michael H. Whitworth
Although the price is rather steep, even for a textbook, this isn’t a book you can just read through, put back on the shelf and forget. For those that want an insight, both as reader, and perhaps more valuably, as writer, into the techniques of poetry in general, and those specific to the giants of poetry that make up the ultra-influential modernist movement, this is a book that can be returned to regularly. It is well structured, well researched, clearly written, and full of innovative insights.