I finally made it to the Roxane Gay party! Bad Feminist is a critically acclaimed collection of essays by Roxane Gay that covers many topics. The essays are divided into categories such as “Gender and Sexuality,” “Race and Entertainment,” “Politics, Gender and Race,” and “ME.” Within each category, Gay offers a number of essays related to the topic at hand, writing with insight, well-argued liberal opinions, and humor. She is well versed in politics and pop culture, and is willing to reveal something of herself […]
Somebody give Glen Weldon a high-five.
The best thing about The Caped Crusade, Glen Weldon’s book-length ode to Batmania, is Glen Weldon himself. Sure, the actual book is informative and well thought out, organized and insightful. But it’s also got a personality to it, thanks to Weldon, who impregnates even the most mundane sentence with his dry wit and his enthusiasm for his two subjects (Batman, the nature of nerdery). His twin theses? Nerdery isn’t about what you love, but loving what you love with a staggering, vacuum-sucking passion. And that […]
Oofta
I have really mixed feelings about The Stranger in the Woods. I picked it up because I had heard good things and I remember reading the original magazine story about Christopher Knight and being enthralled. By the time I finished reading this book however, I felt kind of dirty and guilty for having read it. This book is an ethical quandary. In 1986, Christopher Knight drove into the main forest and disappeared from society. It wasn’t until 27 years later when he would be arrested […]
Dedicated People Make Amazing Things Happen
Doctor Elizabeth Ford is a psychiatrist who has worked on and overseen the prison hospital psychiatric wards at Bellevue Hospital in New York since 2000. In this memoir, Dr. Ford describes the conditions, staff and patients in these wards as well as her own personal journey in working with them. Much of what she describes is frustrating and tragic: the lack of space and consistent treatment for those in need, seeing the same prisoners cycle back into her wards over and over, stories of individual […]