It’s easy to pick on Richard Nixon. The list of his crimes, aspersions against his character, and embarrassments he forced on this country is long enough that it could take up this entire review. He was a blight on the office he felt so entitled to. He is the avatar for nefarious public officials limited by a base cunning and furtive guile. His promise was ambrosia; his delivery: brinksmanship. Richard Nixon savored attention, but skulked in the darkness of public derision. Every friend was an […]
The Actually-Very-Loud American
I took a graduate seminar in Graham Greene when I was getting my MA, and so I’ve read a LOT of Graham Greene. My project for that class was examining Greene’s relationship with film and cinema. One of the books I was interested in reading (but ultimately lacked the time to explore) was The Quiet American, which was made into a film in the mid-to-late 1990s. I finally got around to reading it, thanks to an audiobook request I put in through my library. Thomas […]
A book about the American character and the ties that bind
Thompson opened up an unfamiliar world for me inside my very own country, the world of the mid-West where change comes more slowly … but inexorably. Jean Thompson’s book reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that it offers a long view of a mid-western family’s trials and tribulations. And yet Thompson treats her characters with the poignancy and compassion that real, if flawed, people deserve, while Franzen’s characters were too often caricaturized and mocked for my taste. The Ericksons are a […]
Giving Rebirth is Not For the Weak
There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake oneself. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the images of dreams. Even 25 years after it was first published, the themes of this novel remain relevant: the immigrant experience of trying to assimilate into US culture and the particular experience of a young Hindu woman who chooses to defy traditional expectations and dares to remake herself. Violence, including murder, is a part not just of Jasmine’s personal story but of other women, […]