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An Incomplete Revenge (Maisie Dobbs Mysteries) by Jacqueline Winspear
Revenge Isn't Swet
A review by Carrie Uffindell
Psychologist and sleuth Maisie Dobbs returns for her fifth adventure in An Incomplete Revenge, a mystery novel by Jacqueline Winspear. Set in England in the autumn of 1931, 13 years after the end of the Great War, Revenge probes the darkness which lies beneath the surface of picturesque Heronsdene, a small village located in rural Kent. Maisie, now fully recovered from a nervous breakdown she suffered during an investigation the year before, is approached by James Compton, an old friend and businessman. James wishes to purchase a potentially valuable brickworks from Alfred Sandermere, but...
Feminism, Inc.: Coming of Age in Girl Power Media Culture by Emilie Zaslow
Girl Power Less
A review by Jennifer Cognard-Black
Run a Google image search on "girl power," and what comes up is a series of visual contradictions: a pink woman's symbol with a fist in the circle; a photo of a businesswoman's legs, in stockings and stilettos in front of a chorus line of men's trousers; girls sporting athletic gear; "girl power" emblazoned across bikini underwear; and an ad for a porn film. In these images the power afforded girls is mixed. A working woman is reduced to her girly fashion sense. A little girl's source of influence is what's written on her panties. And almost every image is linked to consumerism. "Girl power...
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by N+1 (cor)
Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager
A review by Scott McLemee
Jim Barnett, the title character of Mary McCarthy's story "A Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man", is a genial and self-assured American liberal who becomes radicalised -- however temporarily and unsystematically -- following the crash of 1929. He is modelled on various real-life figures (John Chamberlain, Dwight Macdonald and James Burnham) who would have been recognizable when it appeared in The Company She Keeps (1942). But he could be alive now, after all. The type is perennial; for the influx of young Ivy Leaguers into literary and political circles is continuous, and prone to...
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Black Elvis (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) by Geoffrey Becker
An Harmonious Collection
A review by Jaspar Lepak
Geoffrey Becker's second book of short stories, Black Elvis, offers a brilliant collection of characters, cities, bizarre relationships, and oddly resonant endings. As the title suggests, music is what holds these stories together: whether the main character is a black man who plays Elvis tunes at a weekly dive-bar blues jam or the scene opens on a Parisian street corner between a Jimi Hendrix impersonator and a fast-tempoed bluegrass fiddler, Becker's keen sense of range for the human condition is written through the lens of music -- though that lens keeps twisting in and out of focus.
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State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen
A Second Draft of History
A review by Anna Godbersen
In December of last year, James Risen was one of two New York Times reporters to break the story of the National Security Agency's vast, unprecedented, and, depending on your political point of view, illegal domestic spying program. His new book State of War fills in the back story and future prospects of the Bush administration's fraught (to understate the situation) relationship with intelligence. Risen places the NSA's warrant-less espionage (the agency is now "eavesdropping on as many as five hundred people in the United States at any given time," he writes) within the larger story of a...
Sixty Poems (08 Edition) by Charles Simic
A review by Chris Faatz
Any new book by Charles Simic is a cause for celebration. He's had a long and illustrious career as poet, critic, and memoirist, and his weird, sometimes funny, often disturbing insights on the human predicament are always rewarding. Now, in celebration of his status as our new(ish) Poet Laureate, Harcourt has issued a selection of poems from his last several collections. Sixty Poems is a careful and loving distillation of the most recent phase of Simic's work. While still clearly influenced by the heady surrealism which dominated so much of his early work, these poems increasingly reflect ...
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