Book Reviews — Page 3

I love the slyness, insider insinuations, hints, the elegance and sophistication of Barnes’s writing in The Noise of Time. He begins with a surreal scene in a train station going toward Moscow. We don’t know who is on the train platform; the character is “he” for twenty pages of panic, degradation, fear, memory, black humor,Continue reading “REVIEW: THE NOISE OF TIME, by Julian Barnes”

THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS did not take me far from the mirror. ANIMAL FARM, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, THE ROAD, and 1984 took me into more frightening and uncomfortable worlds, and they happened close to home.

Lisa Romeo’s new memoir, STARTING WITH GOOD-BYE, is an Everywoman’s tale. My father was not like her father, but her story is mine, and will resonate with all women who realize too late that their father would have been, if they had ever been able to talk to each other without bickering, their best advisor,Continue reading “BOOK REVIEW: STARTING WITH GOOD-BYE”

Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, is an iconic Yankee manifesto. I am a Yankee, yet I had never read it. I opened it expecting a clarification of our American spirit, like reading Walt Whitman. As a memoirist, I found a similarity between his book and my own; man/woman goes into unfamiliar territory with the express intentionContinue reading “BOOK REVIEW: WALDEN”

This book can be read on many levels – for a linguist like me, its linguistic observations were a blast of fresh air, for a historian it is rich with commentary, and for a writer or avid reader, the allusions are legion, including the title, which pays homage to the eponymous novel by Dostoevsky. (MyContinue reading “BOOK REVIEW: The Idiot, by Elif Batuman”

I put down the book discouraged and unimpressed, though a little better informed about people I know who have been tragically transformed by a childhood violation.

I have heard a great deal about the haughtiness and self-satisfaction of “Yankees,” and when Vance refers to “Americans,” that is who he is referring to – the types he met at Yale

THE BOOK OF TEA and WHAT THE STONES REMEMBER

How many risks would I be willing to take to find an egg for my family?