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2 Responses to "Book News for Thursday, August 23, 2007"

Miss Gretchen August 24, 2007 at 08:15 AM

I read that NYT profile yesterday too, and what can I say, sure, I'm sorry for the nutty lady, and I wish her economic luck for her child's sake, but her whole phenom was never my cup of tea. When my friends and I read Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1979, we were shocked. They weren't showing such things every night on network television, as a recent Powells Blogger pointed out. We had been economically sheltered kids (although many in our group lived the middle class version of what Selby wrote about) and reading those stories opened our eyes and our hearts -- it made us more compassionate people even though the stories also helped to give us the tougher skin no amount of black leather jacket could provide. Not long after, crawling towards the 90s, I went into the Tower bookstore on 4th Street and noticed a section called "transgressive" and I thought, oh brother. Now the "shocking" had become a badge of transgressive coolness. Everyone had to up the ante. Will the hearts be opened, or just become deadened? Then came LeRoy and those stories were supposedly true. It did not at all help people like myself who were working with children and trying to determine just exactly what was going on out there in Ammmurika, how damaged were/are the children coming to us to be educated. And I certainly don't think that LeRoy's books helped any young writer who was trying to be true to their experience and also tell a good story. Everyone likes a story which is about "the triumph of the human spirit." But as we see with Oprah and Mr. Frey, people get _real mad_ when that triumphant story is just a bunch of lurid BS. Hustlers of the transgressive don't help the real people out there who are living lives of pure hell. If the writer cares so much, why don't they get out there and do some reportage, like a Katherine Boo? Speaking of the New Yorker, according to litblogs I guess I'm super uncool because I read it and like it -- if I don't know anything about a subject (Alex Ross on m

Shandy August 23, 2007 at 03:03 PM

That Sabuda dinosaur pop-up book is great! The detailing is intricate and beautiful, and, dare I say, a little scary. V. cool!

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