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Farewell, My Subaru: An Epic Adventure in Local Living by Doug Fine
It's a Fine Life
A review by Lydia Millet
One day roving journalist Doug Fine decided to change his life. He would move to the Mimbres Valley in southern New Mexico, trade in his trusty 12-year-old Subaru for a biodiesel-fueled monster truck, buy a couple of Nubian goat kids and some chicks, start a garden and set out to live an oil-free life. Farewell, My Subaru is his memoir of that venture. Known for his first book, Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man, which tells the story of his previous life-changing move, that time to Alaska, Fine is an amiable and self-deprecating storyteller in the mold of, say, Douglas Adams. (The name of ...
Snobbery: The American Version by Joseph Epstein
A review by JoAnn Gutin
In Berkeley, Calif., where I used to live, snobbery was political; those of us who sent our kids to public school and brought our own mugs to the coffee shop felt mildly superior to private school parents who tolerated single-serve containers. On the Upper East Side of New York, site of my current digs, snobbery is about places and things; every restaurant, every dog breed, every pair of shoes has a precise snob quotient. In the American South, snobbery still revolves around your ancestors; a Southern friend recalls grown-ups trying to place her by asking, "Sugar, who's your daddy?" In New...
Mister Wonderful: A Love Story by Daniel Clowes
Chronicling the Quotidian
A review by James R. Fleming
In many respects Daniel Clowes's Mister Wonderful cannot be properly described as a graphic novel (Clowes, for the record, refers to the book simply as "a love story"). While the book is certainly what might broadly be defined as an "illustrated narrative" -- or what the less fussy among us still like to call a "comic book" -- it bears none of the standard structural or thematic hallmarks of a novel. The narrative is short and succinct, the perspective is limited to one character and focuses on one extended incident, and the story arrives at a rather definitive conclusion, hence the book can...
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A Quiet Revolution: The Veil's Resurgence, from the Middle East to America by Leila Ahmed
Hidden in Plain Sight
A review by Christine Stansell
Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at...
Fanon by John Edgar Wideman
Fanon
A review by John Leonard
In Fanon (Houghton Mifflin, $13.95), as in most fiction by John Edgar Wideman, the wounds are equally personal and historical, equally inside out and outside in, jury-rigged and hardwire. So Wideman, thinking about the West Indian psychiatrist and political activist who wrote The Wretched of the Earth, who fought for France against the Nazis and against France in Algeria's war for independence, will invent a novelist named Thomas who wants to write a book on Fanon and/or make a film about him with Jean-Luc Godard, who also puts in a truculent appearance. But don't expect to learn more about...
You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antler
A review by Eric Zassenhaus
In You Never Call! You Never Write! Joyce Antler traces the origins and history of the Jewish mother from her arrival in New York's Yiddish theaters and early American cinema to her present-day manifestations in the standup routines and television shows where she's become a regular player. Along the way, Antler tells the story of Jewish acculturation and assimilation in modern America, as well as changing notions of motherhood in American feminist discourse. Tracing the Jewish-mother archetype from the doting and affectionate, if sometimes overprotective, matriarch that Al Jolson croons...
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