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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The book I read was Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. The book describes Black and Latino boys’ experience with the criminal justice system and how it can limit the future of these boys. All the boys in the book are from Oakland and it is shocking how they are treated by …
Mysteries, police procedurals, and historical fiction are some of my guilty pleasures. The Informers (2009, originally published in Spanish in 2004) by the young Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has elements of all three genres, plus it is beautifully written to boot. A Colombian journalist Gabriel Santoro writes a memoir of Jewish family friend Sara …
The Red Tree by Shaun Tan is a picture book– but don’t under estimate the world within! Tan is able to capture the attention of any reader by the ornate detailed illustrations. The phenomenal pictures in the book engulf you in a sea of emotions and the use of selective words fully illuminate the story. …
In The Whistling Season, Ivan Doig invites readers to visit a small farming community in Montana, about a hundred years back. There, we observe frontier ways of life, as these are inexorably yielding to encroaching modernity. This book portrays some of the important cultural origins of our times, in the form of a novel with …
I am reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. The book, vaguely based on the premise that people today are rarely “lost,” explores the gray area between danger and stability. Consisting of nine short essays, it jumps across disciplines, pulling references from history, art, literature, Solnit’s dreams, and her friend’s anecdotes. I …