If you live under a rock, Orange is the New Black is the memoir of a Smith College grad who spent her post-college days experimenting with lesbianism and drug trafficking. Okay, to be fair, she might have been more grounded in the former than the latter, but it’s not really clear from the book. Watch the Netfiix series, though, and you’ll get waaaaaaay more lesbionic love scenes than the source material proffers. But that’s not to say you should skip the book! OITNB (get with […]
It’s a Relative
This book had been on my To Read list for a while based solely on the title; it’s a sweet and sentimental memoir but wasn’t enough to entice me to read the other books Wade Rouse has written. Rouse jumps in-between his childhood and his present day as he recounts his favorite memories related to each month. It’s a cute concept even though the timeline gets a little hard to follow. He manages to get two or three stories per month by including stories from […]
War Is Never Over
Primo Levi’s memoir The Reawakening begins where his Survival in Auschwitz ended. It’s the last days of the WWII, and Levi is trying to stay alive in what passes for a hospital or sick bay in concentration camp. Levi, who committed suicide in 1987, was an Italian Jewish writer and a chemist. He was arrested in as a part of the Italian resistance in 1943, and to escape being shot as a partisan, he confessed to being Jewish, and after a short interment in Italy, […]
Reflections on Being a Woman
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8kpYm-6nuE] When I lived in New York, I used to watch Sleepless in Seattle all the time. That and When Harry Met Sally. Now that I’m back in Seattle, when I’m missing New York, I watch When Harry Met Sally, or You’ve Got Mail. No, I don’t have an obsession with Meg Ryan; I have a love of fun, sweet movies that feature two of my favorite cities and have interesting female leads. But there is a common thread across these movies, and that […]
J. Maarten Troost’s Latest Travelogue: Enjoyed the Wit, Wished for More Substance
I became a fan of J. Maarten Troost when I read The Sex Lives of Cannibals, his 2004 travelogue that describes the time he spent on the little-known (to most Americans, at least) South Pacific nation of Kirabati. The author’s style is amusing and self-deprecating, and he has some worthwhile commentary on politics and the attitudes of the Western world. Nine years later, Mr. Troost published Headhunters on My Doorstep, and while I still enjoy his writing style, the book sadly lacks substance. J. Maarten […]
More About Katrina
While at a friend’s house for dinner last week, a friend lent me this book. This is the same one who turned me on to steampunk, so I trusted her judgment. I found this to be a really compelling, interesting and infuriating book about one component of the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. However, I really wish that I hadn’t Googled Mr. Zeitoun when I finished it, for reasons I’ll share at the end. This review will contain some spoilers, because there is a bit of […]