With a hefty dose of humour, the reader is encouraged to consider the impact of what we do today on how the future might look. While the book isn’t didactic, and is often jocular, Williams makes it clear that whether or not the human race survives, and in what shape, is something that we have to imagine and work towards.
A review of The Unknown Capablanca by David Hooper and Dale Brandreth
Overall, this is an excellently researched book which presents a welcome (and a considerable: 208 games!) selection of Capablanca’s minor masterpieces.There is an index of endgames, along with the usual indices of players and openings: a helpful feature.
A review of Missy Higgins – On A Clear Night (Special Concert Edition)
On On a Clear Night, Higgins manages to toe the perfect line between playful, heartfelt, and above all, intimate, even when she’s getting down. The repetition of lines (“it’s not my fault; it can’t be my fault”), slightly off rhymes (“I follow complications like a bloodhound/So pick me up, twist me round, and throw me all the way back down”) and the twist of Higgins’ strong accent and that unusual lilt at the end of her lines, makes On a Clear Night an original offering.
A review of The Happiest Days of Our Lives by Wil Wheaton
I’ve been reading his blog for so long now that calling him Wheaton, or Mr. Wheaton is just as odd as trying to call my junior high teachers by their first names now that I’ve grown. From that standpoint, The Happiest Days of Our Lives reads for me less as an autobiography than as stories being swapped over beers by a couple of old friends remembering the Good Old Days.
A review of Making Money by Terry Pratchett
Pratchett shows his usual flair – wonderfully Dickensian – for names. Lipwig’s girlfriend, a very abrasive young woman, is Adora Belle Dearheart. And the fun gathers in the last quarter of the book to reward the persistence of the reader.
The Search for Home: Dee Dee Bridgewater, Red Earth
Red Earth is a very special recording: it offers joy and thought, African and African-American music, and a woman’s claiming her own power and recognizing the truth—the joy and the suffering—in the world.
A review of Long Afternoon of the World by Graeme Kinross-Smith
The photographs become everyone’s close people. The times and places become our own memories of what we’ve known, and been and where we’ve ended. It is, indeed, a long afternoon – and at the end of it is evening. Though this isn’t a fast novel to read, nor does it leave the reader with a denouement in any sense. Yet it is both beautiful, and powerful in its ability to draw out, like a great poem, the core meaning of a moment.
Dark Androgyne: Ephraim Lewis, Skin (The 15th anniversary)
Ephraim Lewis, in music, might have been an ideal for many others (he is that for me): a being of force and sensitivity, able to reconcile sophistication and soul, a being with an eye for reality and a heart for dreams, able to embody in music contradictions without being destroyed by their conflicts, the dark androgyne.
A review of lettre a d. histoire d’un amour by André Gorz
It really is a lovely, warm piece, and a weepy one for knowing the end of their story. I was relieved that the plan to end of their lives together was not chronicled here, because I became somewhat enamoured of both of them, and of the love they shared.
A review of Tremolo: cry of the loon by Aaron Paul Lazar
The real attraction of the book is – and this quality it shares with the other Gus LaGarde books – the charm of the author and the opportunity for the reader to share in a gracious life built on warm relations with family and friends. The joys of the table and the love of music and the appreciation of the quiet joys of reading embrace an ideal but not impossible world.