I read daily and love reading. I also like reading book reviews by savvy reviewers like New Yorker/Slate reviewer Katy Waldman, particularly her review of The Brothers Karamazov (Bernard and Kurt Vonnegut) by Ginger Strand in Slate.
Here are just a few of my book reviews. Hope you enjoy one or more.
David Damrosch, Around the World in 80 Books
Gary Eller, a novel, True North
Charles J. Shields, a biography of Kurt Vonnegut, And So It Goes
Nicholas L. Syrett, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities
James Swan. In Defense of Hunting
Gertrude Skivington, a novel, Echevarria:
Excerpt:
Echeverria is an epic without a traditional hero. As is often true in literature portraying ethnic groups, women are the formidable gender. A stout Basque wife operates the Echevarria business while her husband Pedro secludes himself in the wine cellar with his daily newspaper. It is the wife who takes in the wounded Chinese boy Elias Elí–known as Lee–and sees he is nursed back to health and taught to read. Lee’s love interest is a Basque young woman cast out by her father.
In the end, the Great Basin community over more than a century has but one symbolic constant: the physical Echevarria, as the institution evolves from rooming house to casino. Skivington’s Elko County is as compelling a literary home as is William
Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Its fictional Paradise is not a nice place to visit, but i is a home, home on the range and a compelling setting for Skivington’s art.
Hank Nuwer
Daryl Farmer, “On the Old Denali Road,” from the short story collection titled Where We Land
Ray Boomhower: Dispaitches from the Pacific
Robert Laxalt, In a Hundred Graves
Pablo Neruda, Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta
An Appreciation of Ezra Pound