To come to a judgment: the pieces in Dark Paradise hit home more often than not, and the way in which an overarchingly oppressive mood is sustained frequently impresses.
A review of You Can’t Win by Jack Black
To sum up: this is a memorable book and was an influential one too, for the Beats especially (“on the road” is a phrase that recurs throughout; Kerouac seems to have palmed it from here). It is that rare thing: a cult book that lives up to its reputation. Its take-home message: the world is a tool for self-discovery; not at all bad for an autobiography.
Reconciliations: Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, Breathing Under Water
Each has spoken of how natural their collaboration has been, allowing them to explore new aspects of their talents, while making a statement about how complementary different forms of music are: on Breaking Under Water, she, as composer and instrumentalist, handled some of the electronic productions and worked as a pianist, and he composed, and played guitar, drums, and even sang.
There Is No Cure for Human Nature: Donnie, The Daily News
Sometimes gospel singers slur their words as part of their technique, a changed diction suggesting a changed spirit; and Donnie has identified some gospel singers as his antecedents: Rance Allen, Darryl Coley, John P. Kee, and James Moore. Donnie’s social imagination harkens back to Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and Sly Stone; and, amazingly, he does not suffer in comparison. However, he does not want to be—and is not—a nostalgia act.
Self-conscious Beauty and Contemplation: The Shepherd’s Dog, by Iron and Wine, featuring Sam Beam
With its somewhat ominous beginning, I had hoped that “Peace Beneath the City” might give a surprise—but it seems little more than atmosphere, intriguing atmosphere but merely atmosphere, although the lyrics seem to be intricate and about many deaths, with bodies buried beneath the city.
A review of How Good Is Your Chess? by Larry Evans
To make a reckoning: How Good Is Your Chess? is an enjoyable and challenging collection of chess puzzles. The solutions are generally accurate and Evans’ comments are often instructive. Working through the book and making at stab at solving the positions will undoubtedly help you improve as a chess player.
A review of A Mirror in the Road by Morris Dickstein
If you chart Dickstein’s emphases as a line graph, you will find that it spikes sharply upward at certain authors. Although he sees Joyce, Mann, and Kafka as the dominant modernists, he writes relatively little about the first two compared to what he writes about Kafka. Joyce is too knotty a problem to be dealt with in a book that has many other considerations.
A review of The PK Man by Jeffrey Mishlove
The question remains, is the mind of the agent for psychokinesis creating these events, or merely becoming receptive to their existence? In this way the book is about the unexplored nature and potential of human consciousness, and how it might exist, co-exist and interact with physical matter.
A review of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross
He has an engaging readiness to gossip. His portraits, largely unfriendly, of Nicholas Nabokov and Theodor Adorno are skilful and have a hint of venom. In other contexts, he is equally gifted at bringing to life the relations, often troubled, of the musical giants of the past century. He presents many incidents that explain much about the musical developments of the period. Some of these are far from edifying – and often all the more amusing for that.
A review of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
In some ways it is like a very interesting first installment to a longer story. Although this disappoints one’s conventional longings for a neat fictional package, it is on more sophisticated grounds eminently satisfactory. This, the eighth book by Cameron, is an accomplishment that provides an irresistible blend of the moving and the witty.