This book fed my competitive spirit! Brown chronicles the story of the motley crew, University of Washington rowers and their unlikely success to win seats to the 1936 Olympics. As much a story of their individual characteristics and backgrounds, the book also depicts two powerfully disturbing backgrounds of the time: Seattle during the Great Depression …
Over the summer, I decided to pick up Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I had been avoiding reading the classic, despite recommendations from numerous friends, out of fear that it would be strictly about war, hardship, and strategy. However, the novel turned out to be surprisingly hilarious. Each and every page revealed the absurd nature of …
Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez’s book, The Beast, takes readers on a journey through hell. In Spanish, the book’s title is, Los Migrantes que no Importan, which captures its subject better than, The Beast. The migrants Martínez writes about don’t matter to anyone. Everything in the book flows from that fact. The Beast is a translated …
This summer I picked up the book Zona by Geoff Dyer. The subtitle is “A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room,” and so far it is is just that. Dyer recounts his first experience with Andrei Tarkovsky’s seminal piece of cinema Stalker (1979). I came across this book by chance, and …
The Heir Apparent: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince is a fascinating account of the life of Edward VII, Queen Victoria’s son and heir. This biography thoroughly examines and vividly describes every aspect of Edward’s life and sheds light on the very complex relationship that he had with his mother. An absorbing read …
I’m a big fan of Ward Just—a great American novelist who is not as well-known as he should be. He writes above all about the political world and the people in it– Chicago in the ’50s has been a rich subject for him and Washington. He has also written about Americans overseas, expat. life in …
Tell the Wolves I’m Home is an intensely emotional book. AIDS in the 1980’s terrified everyone, and this is the story of an entire family forced to come to terms when the door is abruptly opened. It’s a heartbreaking story filled with confusion, frustration, jealousy, deceit, denial, misconceptions, ignorance, fear and love.
One of my favorite books is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Translated from the original Italian, it follows the surreal conversations between fictionalized versions of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Divided into simple sections titled like, “Cities and Memory” or “Cities and the Dead,” Polo describes the interesting places he has (possibly) encountered. Each short …
The book I am currently reading is Charles McCarry’s The Better Angels. I say this with no small sense of regret, since I’ve been reading this book for at least nine months. More accurately, I’ve been not reading it for at least nine months. It perhaps comes as no surprise that the guilty pleasure of …
Colin Woodard’s American Nations is making its way around my office, and just last week it landed on my desk. Tracing the evolution of eleven regional cultures in North America that have developed distinct identities throughout history, Woodard exposes why our country is so deeply segregated across regional boundaries. The unique history of each “nation” …
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