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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
g.donahue has commented on (14) products
Go Tell It On The Mountain
by
James Baldwin
g.donahue
, August 09, 2010
James Baldwin’s, Go Tell It On The Mountain, tells the story of two generations of an African-American family who began their migration from the south to the northern city of Harlem beginning in 1900. John, the 14-year old stepson of Gabriel Grimes, begins our journey as an up and coming preacher on his 14th birthday, March of 1935. Walking that night with his family to the storefront church in Harlem, the story jogs backward to the previous generation’s struggles migrating north to escape the oppressions both outside and inside the family--finding its way back to the storefront church to witness John’s cathartic awakening. Each family member has his or her own riveting story of the past, yet each is interdependent and leads back to young John’s awakening. John, a young black man in 1930’s Harlem must deal with a religious zealot of a step-father, a community of poverty and violence; yet he finds hope in this insular black community in America which preached the self-worth and intelligence of the black for the first time. Baldwin speaks through a style of veiled biblical references dotted with nuggets of prose that transcend any race and time. This recommended read will challenge and grab you at the same time.
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The Member of the Wedding
by
Carson McCullers
g.donahue
, July 18, 2010
This tiny book packs a psychological punch. Ostensibly about a 12-year old girl’s emotional hardships with growing and change, this fine-toned story relates to any age. Carson McCullers’s novella is rich with characters, all finely wrapped within beautiful prose. Frankie, the 12-year old protagonist, “… had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.” What happens to Frankie? The author brilliantly captures our interest in Frankie’s achingly sweet journey to look for something missing in her life. She looks in the wrong places, wanting desperately to belong---to be a member of the wedding--a keenly sensitive metaphor for belonging. All of us feel like outsiders now and then, and Carson McCullers poetically embraces the essence of that feeling—no matter what age. Set in a Faulkian town in the South--in the heat of August--during the 2nd World War, it is a time and place that witnesses death, racism, and disappointment. But for Frankie, it is her time for change. Women authors from the 1930s and 40s should be (in this reviewer’s thinking) resurrected. Ms. McCullers is known for her psychological depth into the human condition, and this book is a testament to that; but her prose rivals the Faulkners, the Hemingways, and the Steinbecks of early 20th century America. Can be read in one day, but will not be forgotten.
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When I Lived In Modern Times
by
Linda Grant
g.donahue
, July 06, 2010
Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times is an informative, well-written, and engrossing narrative framed in 1946 Palestine. The narrator is a young woman, Evelyn Sert, who begins a journey that takes her to one of the most conflicted regions and time periods in modern history. Her story begins in London as the only Jewish child of a single mother. Evelyn witnesses the bombings of the London Blitz and the subsequent death of her mother. These events lead her to begin life anew in a new region of the world; in a new, burgeoning country. Thus, 20-year old Evelyn commences her exciting, suspenseful, and historically illuminating journey to Palestine in April of 1946. The analogy of her coming-of-age, modern, burgeoning life with that of Israel, is clear; but life for Evelyn who has “the soul of Zion, but the customs of the British”, can be daunting and disillusioning. Conflicts exist everywhere for Evelyn: the conflict of her Britishness with her loyalty to her Jewishness when she discovers the British are the oppressors in Palestine; Evelyn’s conflict with her own identity when she enters Palestine as a Christian tourist and poses as one to work as a hairdresser for British women; Evelyn’s conficts with the socialist ideals of the kibbutz experiment she is introduced to; and, finally, Evelyn’s conflict when she takes on a lover from the infamous Irgun terrorist organization fighting for the State of Israel. The narrative is told with verisimilitude and passion; the themes of modernity and youth underscore it all. This book won the Orange Prize for fiction and deserves it. I am surprised I haven’t heard more about this book written in 2002. An inspiring read for those historical fiction lovers, and a most recommended read for those who love a good story.
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American Gothic The Biography of Grant Woods American Masterpiece
by
Thomas Hoving
g.donahue
, June 20, 2010
A different kind of biography, Thomas Hoving opens the door to the general public in this enchanting synopsis of Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic. He greets us with a question as though holding our hands on an intrepid journey. He encourages us to look and “….write down what comes to mind in the first thousandth of a second, the blink of an eye, when looking at the illustration of American Gothic…” We breath a sign of relief---we need only rely on our eyes. After all, greeted by the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from 1967 to 1977, giving you a personal viewing of one painting can hasten the heart rate. But we are not expected to draw upon our miniscule understanding of an esoteric art form or offer up an historical analysis, but, rather, just use our eyes. “…to look at every millimeter of the work, front, back, and sides, and walk right inside the artist’s mind.” (page 15) Think of the author as a docent, asking you for your own gut feeling about the work, followed by a near-erudite analysis of the piece, then, once again, back to yourself, “after you have peeled American Gothic apart like an onion.” ( page 126) The book moves on in this manner. We listen attentively without the over loaded jargon of an art historical analysis. This book is user-friendly which makes it so appealing. Only 122 pages of actual text, Hoving guides the reader on what to ask of a painting and what this painting has given to the American culture. Simple, down-to-earth language is in keeping with the style of this regionalist, countrified image. Other than seeing this painting (at the Art Institute of Chicago) with a renewed eye, this little book is a pedagogical handbook on how to look at art written with the layperson in mind---“as connoisseurs….we’re going to be primarily---even obsessively---interested in the simple reality of the work itself and how good or bad it is.” Hoving covers everything; from the genesis of the painting, to the almost celebrity status of the artist, its short-lived demise, and finally to the renewed recognition as an icon of American Fine Art. I love it for its brevity and its broad appeal, although I do wish the illustrations were a bit more extensive. Next time you are in Chicago, make sure you read this book before you go to the Art Institute.
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Chance Meeting Intertwined Lives
by
Rachel Cohen
g.donahue
, June 14, 2010
If you have even the slightest curiosity of the lives of famous American writers, poets, artists, or otherwise cultural icons—this book is for you. How would you like to visit Mathew Brady in his studio in New York City when he photographs Walt Whitman? How about walking alongside Mark Twain in Boston as he enters the publishing office of William Dean Howells to thank him for a great review? Or witness the intersection between the lives of writer Katherine Anne Porter and tragic poet Hart Crane in Mexico in the early 1930s. Each chapter introduces a meeting between two or three famous figures ranging in time from the Civil War Era to the Civil Rights Era, over a period of 100 years. Alfred Stieglitz pops up in three different “meetings” as a central figure of importance to the avant-garde at the turn of the century. I also enjoyed the chance meetings between younger figures and their older mentors such as Willa Cather and her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett, or Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. For humor, the story of the genesis of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal “the Fountain” was well worth it; or Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological measuring of heads in New York City streets that made me chuckle. It turns icons into people and gives us a glimpse of what might have been. If you are looking for biography, this is not it; but you will end up a little richer in your who’s who in American culture list. Each ‘meeting’ is the spark which brings the ‘chance meeting’, then the author interweaves short histories of the characters involved, to return again to the original spark of the ‘chance meeting’ in the first place. Each visit or encounter has notes in the back of the book, which explain where the idea germinated. All of these chance meetings are backed up with a smorgasbord of evidence, even more to the reader’s delight to find an impressive and tantalizing bibliography for further reading. Rachel Cohen researches and expands biographies to create 36 chapters, each depicting a hypothetical meeting among 30 well-known (at least to the student of American history) cultural icons. The author, Rachel Cohen, calls this “imaginative fiction.” I prefer to call it “imaginative nonfiction.” But, nevertheless, an interesting slant on biography for 30 American cultural icons. Grab a cup of tea and let your imagination soar. American Literature’s repertoire can use books with unique perspectives like this. Historical works and biographies can be too limited, too large, and too pedantic as a sole reading source for the literature lover. So I applaud this new perspective and the work it took to bring it all together. As a teacher, I would like to see more of this for the secondary marketplace to reach the imagination of students.
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A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by
Elaine Showalter
g.donahue
, May 30, 2010
What: Jury of Her Peers-American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, by Elaine Showalter, 2009 This literary history, organized chronologically over 350 years of American women’s literature, makes distinctions, selections, and judgments over this often overlooked segment of American history. The title is based on the 1917 short story by Susan Glaspell called, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The theme of Susan Glaspell’s short story raises the moral question of how a patriarchal world can fairly judge a woman’s value. In the case of “A Jury of Her Peers”, a woman’s guilt is in question; but Elaine Showalter then extrapolates the theme to that of the futility of women writers being judged as writers by a patriarchal world of publishers and editors. This 500-page, very-readable history is for those who love literature--especially American literature—and even more precisely, little-known women’s literature. It unfolds and reveals a rich panorama of our history. How did the author approach such a voluminous task, and what distinguishes women’s literature from literature written by men? Elaine Showalter clarifies that she is not basing her distinctions or judgments on biology or any sexual differences; but, rather, on societal pressures on women over these 350 years as opposed to the pressures and roles of men. From such a broad and sometimes obscure history, the author focuses her search for women who wrote for publication as opposed to women who wrote diaries, letters, recipes, etc. She also focuses on traditional literary genres—poems, plays, and fiction as well as popular fiction, girls’ books, hit plays, and satiric verses. Negotiating the task of writing as a vocation with the other daily tasks of women throughout our history is a constant challenge that runs throughout these writers’ lives. And inviting us into their lives to see how they did it all was fascinating. How they all juggled their writing careers tells us something about the cultural changes constantly occurring. This author identifies the first phase in women’s writing to be analogous to all cultural history at this point; “the prolonged phase of imitation of prevailing modes…”; the phase of “protest against these modes along with its corresponding advocacy of independent rights and values”; and, third, the phase of self discovery”. Or more bluntly put, “feminine, feminist, and female.” Whatever your reason for picking up this tome, you cannot help but be intrigued by all the authors names and want to rush to your community library. Susan Glaspell’s story, “Jury of Her Peers,” can be found on the Internet along with a few others. A truly grand accomplishment that is keeping literature alive and teaches us there is no end to learning.
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Siam
by
Lily Tuck
g.donahue
, March 16, 2008
With true Lily Tuck style, the author chooses a poignant period of history and wraps a good story through it. Limited to under 200 pages, this author writes a laconic, yet powerful and suspenseful story coupled with a surprising twist of events. The setting is 1967 in Bangkok on the verge of the Vietnamese War with youthful Claire and her young husband moving to Bangkok for his governmental contract work. Claire, a young bride is thrust into a foreign culture on the verge of war with an absentee husband. The title suggests it could be about a place or a person. Both topics deserve our attention. Highly recommended.
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News From Paraguay
by
Lily Tuck
g.donahue
, March 16, 2008
One of the ways in which I judge a book is whether I want to read more by this author. Or, even better, did you ever finish a book and want to reread it? Then you have a winner. I wanted to do both. The writing style hits me first. It draws me in with an almost journalistic style of a story set in the 1850âs in the French-settled Paraguay. Her fiction transports the reader to places and times rich in stories and characters, yet her style is one of succinctness and focus. She never lost me amid the stories. The author chooses a female protagonist, Ella Lynch, Irish born and beautiful, to tell the story of 19th century Paraguay. The story unfolds in her youth in Paris. A grand history of the little-known country of Paraguay and its violent war with its neighbors.
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James Mcneill Whistler Beyond The Myth
by
Ronald Anderson
g.donahue
, January 27, 2008
If you like art, but think you don’t know enough about it, a great artist’s biography can give one an education and insight along with a good read. This volume of over 400 pages, chronologically covers the life of this important and versatile American artist. His childhood spent in America and Russia, his fights with the art world establishments in London and Paris at a crucial period in the history of art, his many women, his irascible nature, and the controversial nocturnes and their effect on the art world. A fascinating read of an expatriate at the end of the 19th century as well as a great read of the Parisian art world and the struggles artists endured to forge in new directions. The real power of the biographical genre is, I feel, the anecdotal information one gleans of the coterie of artists surrounding the central figure; and this biography relishes us with compassionate anecdotes about Whistler’s friend Monet, visits with the French Realists, Manet and Courbet, difficulties with literary great Oscar Wilde, and many more. “Whistler’s life provides a window through which we catch a glimpse of one of the most exciting periods of art and social history.”
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Portrait The Life Of Thomas Eakins
by
William S McFeely
g.donahue
, January 27, 2008
A charming, short (200 pp) biography of this all-American artist. His close ties with his family, friends, his heartaches, and his successes in his lifetime are treated with clarity, compassion, and succinctness, along with nodding references to his homosexuality and the Victorian repressions that thwarted it. I loved the author’s chapter on the relationship with Walt Whitman. Both artists, Whitman 20 years Eakins’ senior, sought for the freedom of the soul of the artist, and both are revered to this day for that work. “Whitman said of Eakins that he was more than “a painter—a force.” Thomas Eakins lived during a burgeoning and newly-defining period of American Art History. Art schools and art museums in all the big cities were just getting started in the latter half of the 19th century and Eakins was instrumental in challenging traditional mores in these academies. Classical European artwork filled the homes of the wealthy with an American style still finding its direction. Thomas Eakins’ life and work existed at a very important time in the country. His verisimilitude of the American soul in art pointed to the future, indeed, to the New York Ash Can School of the early 20th century and beyond. Biographies don’t have to read like novels, but a good biography should inspire and educate and McFeely does just that in a much-appreciated 200 pages.
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Thread of Grace
by
Mary Doria Russell
g.donahue
, January 27, 2008
A carefully researched historical work of fiction and well worth the read. I love reading historical fiction that informs us of little-known points of history that would otherwise be forgotten, and the story of the resistance in Northern Italy at the end of World War II is one of these notable stories. Thus, the research and resulting story itself wins me over. The rabbis, the priests, the housewives, even the children–all worked together in the mountains and towns of Northern Italy to fight the German Nazi machine---good certainly triumphing over evil in this case. The unexpected heroism of the Italians overcomes the darkness and evil that so clearly took place during this time. But don’t expect a clean, crisp, melodious telling of the story. The tentacles of death found their way to far too many characters to leave one settled. And the tentacles wind their way through far too macabre scenes of grisly murder and wrenching sadness. Technically, I would have been just as intrigued had the author focused more on fewer characters and developed them better. The characters, the setting, and the themes get lost---almost like a Hieronymous Bosch painting with chaos dashing in and out of the scene and every character just a prop. Characters who change names or use other names drop in and out of the picture making it hard for the reader to identify. In reading other reviews of this book, I don’t seem to be alone in this complaint. However, the author does provide a cheat sheet of characters and a map in the beginning to refer to which helps somewhat. Despite this one fault, the story held up as an important and worthy read of a period in history which displayed the extremes of human behavior.
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Beloved
by
Toni Morrison
g.donahue
, September 04, 2007
The long term effect of slavery is the soul of this tragedy. Written with an expressionistic brushstroke, Toni Morrison’s characters reach beyond the real into the realm of the unreal. Only causality is shared with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Toni’s effects result in a greater complexity of plot and depth of characters, making this a must read for those in the 21st century.
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The White Russian: The White Russian: A Novel
by
Tom Bradby
g.donahue
, September 02, 2007
Days leading up to the Russian Revolution in February of 1917 sets the stage for grisly murders that plague the protagonist chief investigative officer in St. Petersburg. Do the murders have anything to do with the revolutionaries? Well-written and a page turner for historical fiction. A great read!
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by
Jonathan Safran Foer
g.donahue
, August 19, 2007
An eerie puzzle with symbolism, unsettling imagery, and unconventional writing. But how else could you deal with the topic of death at the World Trade Center? A young boy?s father dies on 9-11 and this is his story of how he deals with it. An incredible read---difficult for those conventional novel readers---but worth the challenge.
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