Let me preface this review by saying, get off my lawn. I am not a fan of Justin Bieber, nor the whole “boy band” thing, in general. I don’t really understand how people can become YouTube or Vine personalities to the extent that they are suddenly making huge amounts of money and touring around the country (to a predominantly young audience) as instant celebrities. Auto-tune? No thanks. I miss record stores and the experience of listening to an entire record, as opposed to just downloading […]
Chasing Ghosts
What once appeared to be a simple legacy — a grandfather who escaped, who created a better life away from the European killing fields — became a story of a world upended, a life set aside, a narrative rerouted. This non-fiction work by journalist Sarah Wildman is not the usual account of the Holocaust. After her grandfather’s death, she found a trove of letters written to him from the girlfriend he left behind in Austria after the 1938 Anschluss. Her grandfather Karl Wildman, as the […]
“Oddly Modern Fairy Tales”
The Fourth Pig was originally published in the 1930s and is a reflection of the tense economic/political climate of the late interwar period. Although I had never heard of her, Mitchison’s writing was well known and popular in the 1930s. Her personal history as related by Marina Warner in the introduction marks her as an unusual woman for her time and quite outspoken in her political views. Given her leftist leanings, it is perhaps not surprising that this work in particular faded into obscurity after […]
. . . And I feel fine. . . .
I found this book through a book I read last Cannonball – Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which I didn’t really like. BUT – at the end were a few bonus chapters of another book written by the same author. I was totally sucked in, and bought the whole thing. Hank Palace always wanted to be a police detective, and he recently achieved his goal, which is fantastic. That’s really the only good thing, though. Because a huge asteroid is heading this way. It is […]