In Contrary Laury A. Egan trains her unforgiving eye on some of the 21st Century’s worst features. She takes up toxic childrearing practices; the dicey work of maintaining relationships in the Queer spectrum; the haughty, insular views of the wealthy class; and, among others, the isolation and confusion of older citizens beginning to lose their mental acuity. Through it all she yolks her comprehensive understanding of people’s emotional journeys, and treats her characters and her readers with...
February 16, 2025
"Creation Lake" by Rachel Kushner
In her latest novel, Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner treats us to a cynical, shifty first-person protagonist who must pursue her work using a series of assumed names. One thing on this job that diverts her: a series of email missives from a onetime Paris radical (now retired from trying to overthrow governments) who tries to guide a group of younger, sort-of like-minded activists in rural southwest France. The emails are long and full of philosophical and scientific reflections; as part of her...
February 08, 2025
"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Johan Huizinga
Translated from the Dutch by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich MammitzschJohan Huizinga (1872-1945) was a professor of history at the University of Leiden from 1915 until the Nazis closed the university in 1942 and held him hostage until shortly before his death. He first published The Autumn of the Middle Ages in 1919; this book represents a translation of 1921’s second edition. The current translators, both from the University of Western Washington, cite problems with the first translation into...
January 18, 2025
"Cancelled" by Danny King
I am going to preface this review with the thought that most of my readers know what “cancel culture” is. If you’re fortunate enough to be fuzzy on the concept, it involves the willful defamation and ostracization of a person who may or may not have made a statement offensive to self-righteous observers who lurk on the internet. These observer/judgers bloviate from their self-assigned “high ground.” By and large, these cowards operate in the toxic space of a fully public forum, while maintaining...
January 04, 2025
"The Sumerians" by Samuel Noah Kramer
In The Sumerians (1963) Samuel Noah Kramer cites the “unusually creative intellect and a venturesome, resolute spirit” of the ancient inhabitants of the land between the Rivers Tigris and Euphrates. These attributes allowed them to be the first people ever to build a complex society as we would recognize it today, to dwell in cities, to turn arid land into lush, productive farmland, and as a result successfully to store excess grain. And most sweeping and transformational of all, they developed...
January 01, 2025
"Do Not Say We Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien
Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing follows an unorthodox structure to explore at a personal level two social/political paroxysms suffered by China in the 20th Century: the Cultural Revolution and Red Guard scourge of the mid 1960s and the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. These two iron-fisted crackdowns battered and splintered a family of musicians and poets, members of which had to flee to the desert of Kyrgyzstan, were driven to suicide, or were murdered by the People’s...
December 06, 2024
"Directionality of Humankind's Development" by Victor Torvich
In “Directionality of Humankind’s Development,” Victor Torvich, a physicist and specialist in complex systems, builds a considerable set of data, and applies consistent and rigorous standards to it while tracing the development of the human race. His time frame begins 44,000 years ago, and ends last year, in 2023. His methodology is to define resources humankind invented for itself, and accumulate them over time, and thus measure the creative energy of the race, and try to establish the cumulative...
November 28, 2024
"Parade" by Rachel Cusk
I tried to find a quote that I recalled, about the surprise and shock we receive when fiction reveals the harsh realities that lie beneath the surface. I did find something that veers very close to the narrative mode of this book, and it’s from Tim O’Brien: “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” There’s nothing oblique about the truth in Rachel Cusk’s Parade; she simply doesn’t use conventional scenes, actions or dialogue to exhibit...
November 20, 2024
"The Way It Is" by Shirani Rajapakse
Readers of Shirani Rajapakse’s poetry will be familiar with her anger and impatience in the face of the violent, bloodthirsty politics practiced in so many areas of the world. Children displaced or murdered, families ripped apart, men disappearing without a trace, beautiful, verdant valleys laid waste, legitimate democracies overthrown. Her righteous and justified anger, her outrage, burns the pages of this collection.Readers of her poetry will also be familiar with her startling observations...
October 15, 2024
"There are Rivers in the Sky" by Elif Shafak
In “There are Rivers in the Sky” you will find three narrative strands plaited together, and even though they span many years — from the 1850s to the 2010s — the themes they treat at length are all 21st Century concerns. Elif Shafak’s agenda clearly focuses on current issues, current challenges that sometimes feel intractable. On the whole it is a grand attempt, but I finished it unmoved, disappointed by its cobbled-together feel, and at a distance from the final protagonist. We meet Arthur...
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