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Little Oceans (The Hollyridge Press Chapbook Series) by Tony Hoagland
The Poet as Magellan
A review by Abby Travis
In his new chapbook Little Oceans, Tony Hoagland attempts "to catch a glimpse of life's interior" as he asks: "Am I just some kind of little Magellan standing at the rail of my ship, holding a spyglass to my eye as I sail around and around the world?" Hoagland's world is dotted with uncrossable little oceans: every day we try to make the journey to some undiscovered destination of progress, but each time we flounder and are lost somewhere out in the middle -- and yet, he notes, we remain unchanged. Hoagland begins this small collection with what might seem a proper conclusion: "so we were...
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future by Robert Darnton
By Book or by Crook
A review by Gerry Donaghy
At a recent Book Expo America, author Sherman Alexie, in speaking to an audience of independent booksellers, expressed his desire to hit a woman who he saw using Amazon's Kindle on his flight to New York. I wonder if Alexie would have been so quick to resort to fisticuffs if the woman in question was reading one of his books (he claims to refuse to allow electronic versions of his novels to exist, but he seems okay with his poetry on the Kindle). But such is the emotional power that books have over readers. They inspire thought and action, and they are brandished as totems to express who...
Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict by Irene Vilar
Telling the Utterly Confounding Truth
A review by Cheryl Strayed
I'll say it now: Irene Vilar had 15 abortions in 15 years. That's the blunt opening one-liner that fails to tell the whole story of this beautiful and brave book. Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict is a memoir less about 15 abortions than it is the story of a young woman who never got enough love. At age 8, Vilar watched her mother commit suicide by leaping out of a car. At 12, she read The Diary of Anne Frank and felt scarred -- not from the horror of the Holocaust, but because she so deeply understood the plight of a girl who lived in an attic and had to ask...
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The Fat Studies Reader by Esther (edt) Rothblum
Weighing In
A review by Jessica Holden Sherwood, PH.D.
With a winning audacity, The Fat Studies Reader announces its intention to serve as the foundation of a new academic field. Its editors present convincing voices from law, medicine, social sciences and the humanities, making it difficult to dismiss their case that the time has come for fat studies. As the student authors of one essay note, the subject overflows disciplinary boundaries the same way their bodies overflow the desks in their college classrooms. Most Americans have accepted the health-focused conventional wisdom that obesity is a medical condition demanding prevention or...
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
The Age of Wonder
A review by Benjamin Moser
Richard Holmes's monumental The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Pantheon, $40) opens in 1769, when the dashing young millionaire Joseph Banks alighted on Tahiti, a paradisiacal isle that was to host Captain James Cook's observations of the transit of Venus -- though, as the crewmen discovered, the island's other charms lent the name of their temporary establishment, Fort Venus, more suggestive shades. Banks is the figure that unites a whole panorama of Romantic heroes: as president of the Royal Society, he went on to sponsor all sorts ...
The Ninth (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Ferenc Barnas
The Ninth by Ferenc Barnas
A review by Josh Maday
Telling a story from a child's point of view is one of the most difficult modes of fiction to write successfully. The narrator of Ferenc Barnas's The Ninth is a nine-year-old boy -- the ninth child of ten (eleven, counting the brother who died) in a large Hungarian family -- whose inexperience and bare vocabulary are compounded by a speech disability. In writing The Ninth, Barnas seems to have wanted to give himself a taste of what difficulty his narrator must face when trying to give expression to his experience. Overall, Barnas succeeds, using simple language and a conversational style...
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