This Month's Articles
REVIEWING
City of Veils
by Zoë Ferraris
Reviewed by Jill Noel Shreve
“There was no ringing in his ears, but the brutality of the scene made his skin prickle.” In her second novel, City of Veils, the sequel to her first, Finding Nouf, Zoë Ferraris introduces Detective Inspector Osama Ibrahim against this backdrop of a female’s mutilated, murdered, beached body. Ibrahim stands on the shore alongside the coroner. Both wonder how this woman’s body washed up and how she died.
Set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Ferraris invites the audience.....Read More
ESSAY
Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture
by Thomas Chatterton Williams
An essay by Fred Beauford
Surviving Rap
One of the most devastating attacks on so-called “hip-hop” culture I have read comes not from grumpy old black men like everyone’s favorite father, Bill Cosby, or from one of the most outspoken critics of rap, New York Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch, the self-described “hanging Judge,” but from someone who grew up with, and once had deeply embraced the culture, Thomas Chatterton Williams.
In the end, however, the crux of Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, by the first time author , is not just about rap.....Read More
REVIEWING
Savage Lands
by Clare Clark
Reviewed by Jan Alexander
Dismal Ghosts Along the Bayou
Now that the reality show Who Do you Think You Are? has introduced the concept of ancestor worship to Americans – and even infused it with a Hallmark- sort of coolness – perhaps there is a ready market for tales of those who came here when doing so meant negotiating terms of settlement with the indigenous tribes. The title Savage Lands refers to just that – a vast territory that was home to people the new French arrivals called savages – and Clare Clark, a British historian who specializes in novels about dark lives in distant centuries, has done a meticulous and credible job of dredging up the complexities of the 18th century French colonists who homesteaded – or invaded, depending on your point of view - the swampy.....Read More
REVIEWING
Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde
by Thomas Wright
Reviewed by Sarah Vogelsong
Biography is a difficult literary form to execute today because of our sensitivity to the myriad emotional, social, and cultural layers that compose each individual’s life. Difficult as it is to unpack the experiences of a contemporary, the challenges increase tenfold when the subject lived in an era that demanded the concealment of many of these layers. Such a subject is Oscar Wilde, and such a daunting task is undertaken by Thomas Wright in Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
The broad outlines of Wilde’s life are well known: Born to the .....Read More
REVIEWING
John Oliver Killens—A Life of Black Literary Activism
by Keith Gilyard
Reviewed by Herb Boyd
Only the most unenlightened, totally distracted participant at the Tenth National Black Writers’ Conference at Medgar Evers College this year missed the significance of the late John Oliver Killens (1916-1987) and his tireless dedication at the event’s very inception, in 1986. In fact, the subtitle of the bi-annual conference was And then We Heard the Thunder: Black Writers Reconstructing Memories and Lighting the Way.
Killens’ legacy was invoked at practically every panel, where his literary genius,.....Read More
ESSAY
Holy Warriors—A Modern History of the Crusades
by Jonathan Phillips
An essay by Jane M McCabe
I.
Failing to understand the crucial role the Crusades played in the development of Western civilization, we often disparage them, citing them as the foremost example of violence wrought in the name of religion. This argument is used to explain our distrust of organized religion. We see the Crusades as the time when European knights marched to wrest the Holy Land back into Christian hands. Whereas this is true, a rich.....Read More
LETTERS
Write Me A Letter...
Hi Fred:
--we've not met, but were part of the fox-eating-rabbit discussion. I started reading your acct of growing up in NYC in the 1950s...fascinating! I'm in Salem, MA, working to increase Native American heritage & cultural appreciation. I am also a writer and historian and architect.
John Goff
Salem, Ma.
BEYOND BOOKS
Art Beat
By Lindsey Peckham
Big Bambu
Big Bambú, the adult playground perched on the roof of the Met, is too much fun to miss. Mike and Doug Starn, the artists who created the piece (and will continue to create it in three stages over this spring, summer, and fall), did so with the intention of demonstrating how nature, though always complete, is always growing and evolving. Pick a sunny day and climb through the graceful wilderness these twin brothers.....Read More
REVIEWING
The Double Comfort Safari Club
by Alexander McCall Smith
Reviewed by Janet Garber
Cold Comfort in a Hot Climate
This is the 11th book in The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which debuted in 1998. Set in Gaborone, Botswana, the series, written by Alexander McCall Smith, showcases the talents of a memorable cast of characters: the principal, self-styled detective, Mma Precious Ramotse, her sidekick, Grace Makutsi, and Ramotse’s boyfriend and eventual husband, the mechanic, J.L.B. Matekoni.
Botswana is a land largely unknown to Western readers whose only images.....Read More
REVIEWING
Leonardo's Legacy: How Da Vinci Reimagined the World
by Stefan Klein
Reviewed by Ken Liebeskind
Exploring the scientific roots of Leonardo da Vinci’s genius
In Leonardo’s Legacy, Stefan Klein, a German science writer, reassesses the career of Leonardo. The creator of the Mona Lisa, history’s most famous painting, Leonardo was a critical scientific thinker, who understood water power, designed military weapons, flying machines, robots and a rotary device that has been called “the oldest digital computer in action.”
At the outset, Klein says Leonardo was “far more than an outstanding artist,” yet he contributes an entire chapter on his creation of the Mona Lisa indicating how his scientific mind created it. A series of.....Read More
MEMOIR
…and Mistakes Made Along the Way, an excerpt from a memoir
by Fred Beauford
Chapter Seven—Death and Boredom
By the time I turned sixteen, the number of arrests of my friends in the Projects mounted; and now, the additional grim specter of death became a part of everyday gang conversation: LM died in jail, from what, we never knew, and George Morton was stabbed to death while walking down a street in the South Bronx. He locked eyes with a man sitting on his stoop, and soon words were exchanged. The man ran up to his apartment and came back down with a large butcher knife and plunged it into George’s chest, killing him .....Read More
SHORT STORIES
The Crazy Man
by Howell Hurst
The milk is sour. I only bought it yesterday, but it is definitely sour. I pour it into the kitchen sink, drop the carton to the floor, stamp it flat as an anemic pancake, and toss it into the waste basket. There is a hole in the wastebasket through which the last ounce of leftover milk gurgles onto the floor. Dropping to my knees, I sop it up and a straggly string from the rag I am using wiggles off and sticks to the floor, consummating its relationship with some previously positioned, rancid marmalade of the long defined past.
I bend again to my knees and scrape it all up with a case knife, which, in the process, breaks. I poke the two pieces of the knife into the wastebasket and open the fridge to get another carton of milk. The.....Read More