Reviews of what's good to read.
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January 14, 2001: Caitlin Burke reviews My Year of Meats
, by Ruth Ozeki. Part anti-feedlot diatribe, mostly a story of self-discovery, Ozeki offers a charming yet political book....
June 11, 2000: Dina Gachman reviews White
Teeth , by Zadie Smith. It starts with the suicide of Archie Jones. Or, the attempted suicide....
May 28, 2000: Dina Gachman reviews Normal
Girl , by Molly Jong-Fast. This a familiar narrative that is by no means a semi-feminist manifesto, but who says it has to be?
May 21, 2000: Evan Pritchard reviews
A Cure for Gravity, by Joe Jackson. Performing your own music before an enthusiastic audience is like being suspended in midair, floating....
August 29, 1999: Kate McDonnell reviews The
Harry Potter Series, by J.K. Rowling. Few authors, whether nominally adults' or children's writers, juggle plot and invention with this kind of energy....
September 21, 1998: Evan Pritchard reviews
The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin',
by Bill Zehme. Looking for manhood? Seek out a man who exemplifies it. A man who knows what it is to be a man. A man like Frank Sinatra....
June 8, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews The
Substance of Civilization, by Stephen L. Sass. This friendly, accessible book is determined not to be a textbook....
May 25, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews True
Crime -- the Profilers. America's Most Wanted? Hard Copy? Jerry Springer? Not exactly. John Douglas, Gavin de Becker, and Stanton Samenow tell their stories from the trenches....
April 20, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews The
Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue, by Deborah Tannen. Deborah Tannen offers up a new book filled with her signature care in thought and explanation....
March 9, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews Thinking
Black: Some of the Nation's Best Columnists Speak Their Mind, edited by DeWayne Wickham. Most black journalists and columnists are writing for local papers, and few get national attention. Come and meet some of them....
February 9, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews A
Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America, by David K. Shipler. A balanced, sensitive, and sophisticated exploration of the persistent racism in the US and the biases that help keep it in place....
January 19, 1998: Caitlin Burke reviews Race
Traitor, a journal of the New Abolitionism. Race Traitor calls for a nation in which we are judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.
December 1, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Biomimicry,
by Janine M. Benyus. Benyus shows us how nature has solved problems with an efficiency and cleanness that is the envy of our engineers.
October 20, 1997: Non-Fiction Perspectives
on AIDS, a tour by Caitlin Burke. Writers are trying to make sense of the AIDS epidemic, and they represent a variety of agenda, based at least in part on when they were published....
August 4, 1997: Fiction Retrospective: AIDS,
a tour by Sam Dixon. Every individual has created his or her own image of the spectre. But now we know our villain, and now the tale of our heroes can be told....
July 28, 1997: Kate McDonnell reviews Gut Symmetries,
by Jeanette Winterson. Gut Symmetries is diagrammed out geometrically and is decorated with labels from astrology and the Tarot....
July 14, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Fatal
Extraction: The Story Behind the Florida Dentist Accused of Infecting His Patients with HIV and Poisoning Public Health, by Mark Carl Rom. What really happened? And how did our public-health response rate?
July 7, 1997: Principles and Politics in a Self-Made Nation: Books about Jefferson, Racism, History, and Mythmaking, an eclectic tour by Caitlin Burke. What happens when we plumb the depths of some of our nation's most cherished historical figures and ideas?
June 30, 1997: Sam Dixon reviews The Family
Tree by Sheri S. Tepper. Tepper is not afraid of holding our faces in the worst our society has to offer. In The Family Tree, she doesn't hold our faces above the mud for quite so long....
June 16, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Virus
X: Tracking the New Killer Plagues Out of the Present and Into the Future by Frank Ryan, M.D. Ryan uses evolutionary biology to help explain today's most frightening outbreaks.
May 26, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World by C.J. Peters and Mark Olshaker. The stories of famous viruses are retold in this volume, but Virus Hunter is at once more personal and more institutional than other books in this area....
April 28, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Plastic:
The Making of a Synthetic Century by Stephen Fenichell. Witty and interesting, this charming book describes the early promise and the eventual pain of plastic materials.
April 21, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Medical Blunders: Amazing True Stories of Mad, Bad, and Dangerous Doctors by Robert M. Youngson and Ian Schott. This lurid and clumsy little book shines a pointlessly harsh light on the history of medicine.
April 14, 1997:
Caitlin Burke reviews Yellow Fever, Black Goddess: The Coevolution of People and Plagues by Christopher Wills. Wills's strength is clearly in his strong and engaging
description of science -- its discoveries and its methods....
April 7, 1997: Sam Dixon reviews Glimmering:A Novel of the Coming Millennium by Elizabeth Hand. As the characters journey toward what promises to be an apocalyptic meeting on the eve of the millennium, they travel across a world that seems increasingly empty....
March 31, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine by Stephen Braun. Buzz combines social history and science in this engaging little profile of the effects of alcohol and caffeine.
February 14, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany by Jane Kramer. These focused, personal essays still range more widely than even the "whither Germany" article Kramer says she kept trying to write....
January 10, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Virus Ground Zero: Stalking the Killer Viruses with the Centers for Disease Control, by Ed Regis. Regis offers a sort of querulous anti-history of the CDC, complete with political posturing and a few insults tossed at other journalists....
January 3, 1997: Caitlin Burke reviews Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. Wrangham and Peters manage to present a deeply embittering topic in a light that is both unsentimental and optimistic....
October 25, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Great Books by David Denby, a commercial for Western Culture as narrated by an actor who wishes to assure you of his deep and personal belief in its value -- and just as believable....
September 20, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner counter claims that infertility is rising in incidence, that surgical intervention is new, and that women are victimized by reproductive medicine....
September 6, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, by Paul Rabinow. Making PCR traces a dramatic technological achievement through interview with the people who made it happen.
August 30, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, by Beverly Allen. A fascinating analysis of one of the war's most horrible and inhumane features....
August 23, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, by Fergal Keane. Season of Blood combines history, diary, and essay into an unflinching and introspective snapshot of a truly horrible string of events....
August 16, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case, by Marcia Angell, M.D. Marcia Angell is like
just about everyone who has had anything to say about the breast implant case: She wants to point fingers....
August 9, 1996: Corprew Reed reviews Extraterrestials in Biblical Prophecy by G. Cope Schellhorn. Everyday reality, inasmuch as 'reality' has any meaning anymore, is spent watching the skies in love or fear waiting for God to come in his flying saucer... Also, Caitlin Burke reviews The Body's Edge: Our Cultural Obsession with Skin, by Marc Lappe, Ph.D. "It's your skin, it's what you keep your body in," goes the Garrison Keillor song....
August 2, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, by Joseph B. McCormick M.D. and Susan Fisher-Hoch M.D. Got Ebola? Hear from the physicians who were first in line to investigate some of the most lethal viruses we've ever seen.
July 26, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences , by Edward Tenner. A particular strength of Why Things Bite Back is its many anecdotes that show even simple technology causing more problems than it solves....
July 19, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought , by Marouf A. Hasian, Jr. Hasian describes the many definitions of "eugenics", showing that strict, "hard-line" notions of eugenics were, in fact, widely challenged....
July 12, 1996: Historical double review: Caitlin Burke reviews Not Out of Africa, by Mary Lefkowitz, and Black Athena Revisited, Mary Lefkowitz and Guy M. Rogers, editors. Near East, Classical, and Egyptian experts join forces to challenge Afrocentrism -- and help open new eyes to the beauties of their studies.
July 4, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland. We've all had the experience of receiving a beautifully wrapped gift and finding that the contents didn't live up to the presentation....
June 28, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews Smokescreen, by Philip J. Hilts, and The Cigarette Papers, by Stanton A. Glantz et al. Published near-simultaneously, The Cigarette Papers and Smokescreen present two versions of the Big Tobacco story: hard science and the potboiler.
June 21, 1996: Stevi Deter reviews Neanderthal,
by John Darnton. What if leading anthropologists in search of the proto-men got trapped in the valley with the tribe? One hopes the result wouldn't be Neanderthal.
June 14, 1996: Caitlin Burke reviews On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society , non-fiction by Lt. Col. David Grossman. Grossman covers the basics: it's easier to kill people you can't see, and it's easier to kill people you don't like. Then he goes beyond....
June 7, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Elinor and Marianne by Emma Tennant. "My dearest Jane, imagine my surprise when I entered a bookshop recently and saw that a writer calling herself Emma Tennant has written a sequel to your own Sense and Sensibility...."
May 31, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt. As it turns out, the looseness in Babel Tower isn't of the does-the-plot-resolve nature....
May 24, 1996: Zvi Gilbert reviews The Man from the Ciguri by Moebius. Perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words, but most of
the time, a comic strip panel isn't....
May 17, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Love, Again by Doris Lessing: At 77, Lessing is pulling no punches. Don't read Love, Again on a lonely rainy weekend when your resistance is low, but do read it.
May 10, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker. In her less controlled moments Acker veers towards the exhibitionistic or self-indulgent or merely braggardly.... Don't miss AjD's review of the companion CD by The Mekons.
May 3, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester. Lanchester manages to make this a foodie book and at the same time deliver a good spoof....
April 19, 1996: Zvi Gilbert reviews comic books by Jim Woodring. JIM #6 and Frank's Real Pa. Pay your mental health fee and join the JIMnasium....
April 12, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews Whit by Iain Banks. Banks has two notable strengths as a writer: an ability to speak confidently in the voice of his main character and a penchant for the piling-on of details.
April 5, 1996: Kate McDonnell reviews The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. A wealth of detail about a nanotech future. A highly placed engineer-artifex is approached
with the commission to invent a device....
