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Category: Review (Page 4 of 9)

Book Review: Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by Stephanie Land

February 3, 2019 /

Review by E. Kirshe

Stephanie Land’s memoir about raising a child while trying to raise herself out of poverty should be required reading for anyone who has not struggled with poverty.

 

As Land recounts her move from homeless shelter to more permanent forms of housing- with an eye to becoming financially stable- she also moves through the houses she cleans, the physical and emotional exhaustion that brings, and how every moment of every day was about survival. Every piece of change is counted, every form of government assistance she can get to help keep her kid in school and food on the table is totaled and every moment of her time accounted for. If she wasn’t working she was taking online college courses, holding onto the idea that that would be the way out, or having real moments of family time with her daughter.

 

At times, the book seems a little impersonal for a memoir. There is a lot of focus on who her clients are based on their homes- the idea that she’s invisible- and a lot of reiterating that having the “American dream” home doesn’t mean happiness (though it does mean financial safety, after all, they can afford to not clean their home). Continue reading

Book Review: The Achiever Fever Cure: How I Learned to Stop Striving Myself Crazy, by Claire Booth

January 26, 2019 /

achiever fever coverReview by Tess Tabak

Think back to the last time something good happened to you – that you had something accepted to a literary magazine, or your scuba diving team made it to the semi-finals.

How long did that good feeling sit with you before you started thinking “What next?” Or doubting whether you’d ever achieve that high again?

If you struggle with the need for constant accomplishment and feelings of inadequacy, you might have “achiever fever.” No sooner have we achieved one victory than we’re hunting the next. In Claire Booth’s new self-help book, The Achiever Fever, Cure, she describes her own “fever” and offers practical suggestions to counter it.

Despite starting her own successful business, Booth felt like a failure. When she’s invited to join a group for start-up leads, she feels like a fraud, since her company is so much smaller than others in the group. Even though her business was doing well over all, she found herself struggling with the ups and downs of daily business – losing a single client felt like a personal failing.

The realization that all of this “achiever fever” was sabataging her happiness led her on a yearlong “mesearch” project of self improvement, which she catalogues in the book. Continue reading

Book Review: “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” by Sylvia Plath

January 22, 2019 /

Review by Tess Tabak

Mary Ventura Ninth Kingdom PB c (1)A newly discovered short story by Sylvia Plath is cause for celebration. “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” follows a young girl as she discovers her train is bound for a mysterious destination. The train ride starts as a seemingly normal but dreary metaphor for 1950s life – everyone onboard is crisp and proper, not talking to each other, and Mary feels isolated despite being surrounded by people. Though the cause for the train ride is never revealed, we can guess that she’s heading off to college.

However, as the piece goes on, it’s clear there’s something more sinister at play. We learn that the “Ninth Kingdom” will be the final stop, and once the train reaches its destination there will be no returning.

The piece is raw compared to the work Plath would go on to write (such as her classic, The Bell Jar), but a crude Plath story is still riveting. I read this piece in one sitting. “Mary Ventura” will be of special interest to Plath’s fans. You can see the source of her later writings in it – a girl watching in grim awareness as everyone else is numb to the world, offered a ray of hope at the end. She describes the world in lush detail, yet still manages to convey a sense of dread. “Mrs. Ventura touched a handkerchief to her painted red mouth, started to say something, stopped. There was, after all, nothing left to say.” Continue reading

Book Review: Sugar Run by Mesha Maren

January 17, 2019 /

Review by E. Kirshe

After spending 18 years in prison, Jodi returns to her home in West Virginia’s mountains. Dealing overwhelmingly with redemption, as well as home and maybe more importantly, place, this well-paced novel also beautifully tells a story of imperfect people trying to stitch together their broken lives.

“Until a week and a half ago she had thought she would not return until her death- a body shipped back to a family that barely rmemebered it, a body to be laid back into the mountains to rest- but now here she was not just a body but a jumble of wild thoughts and emotions, coming home.”

Sentenced to life in prison at age seventeen, Jodi didn’t leave behind much of a life to re-build, but she does have dreams of creating one- settling down on her grandmother’s beautiful and wild stretch of land in the mountains where she was raised. Jodi does, however, have one piece of unfinished business, fulfilling a pact she made with Paula, her dead girlfriend, to rescue her brother from their abusive family home.

Just a few pages in you’ll know that Maren is an incredibly skilled, poetic writer. After a beautifully detailed greyhound bus ride (literally every detail in this book is beautifully written), Jodi’s first stop is in a small town to pick up Paula’s brother Ricky, who is now a troubled grown man. In the same span of just a few days (all of this happening before Jodi has to be home to make her first parole meeting) she also meets and quickly falls for Miranda Golden, wife of a faded country star and, though still in her twenties, mother of three. This cobbled together group heads off to Jodi’s land all with the insane hope of creating a new run at life. Continue reading

Book review: The Life of Frederick Douglass by David F. Walker

January 7, 2019 /

Illustrated by Damon Smyth

Review by Tess Tabak

the life of frederick douglass coverIn this powerful new graphic novel, David F. Walker presents Frederick Douglass’s story in a compact narrative that young readers and adults alike can enjoy. With illustrations by Damon Smyth and short lessons that contextualize the history around Douglass’s life, this work will give readers a broader understanding of the end of slavery, and the events leading up to it.

Best known for his work on superhero comics like Luke Cage and Cyborg, Walker does justice to this real life hero’s story. In our Q&A with him, he discussed the importance of telling stories like this, and the need for black heroes, both fictional and historic.

I think Walker’s graphic novel, geared towards young readers, is crucial in making Frederick Douglass’s story accessible for kids. Last year, I was tutoring a 7th grader on the Civil War. I asked him when slavery had ended in America– he answered, with a straight face, that “racism ended in 1980 when Martin Luther King ended slavery”. He believed that, after months of covering slavery in school and despite living in one of the most diverse cities in America. Reading Douglass’s first memoir with him was a painful experience. Not only did he struggle over almost every single word of the text, he had no context for when the events happened. Slavery (and the 20th century, apparently) was a far off fantasy, an abstract myth. Continue reading

Book Review: Mandela and The General by John Carlin, Illustrated by Oriol Malet

December 29, 2018 /

Review by E. Kirshe

Mandela and The General focuses on one stitch in Nelson Mandela’s legacy. In 1994, as the first post-Apartheid elections approach, and black South Africans are ready to take power with Mandela as their president, a militant faction of white South Africans – the Freedom Front – are ready to riot and fight to the death if need be. Attempting to avert a massacre Mandela held a series of secret meetings with Constand Viljoen- a former general of the South African army and later leader of the right-wing Freedom Front party.

“We must strive to find a political solution that reconciled White fears with black aspirations.”

As leaders of opposing factions they have the pull to keep their people from becoming violent and through reason, Mandela convinces Viljoen to reel his people in, to create true peace and not “the peace of graveyards.”

The book is told mainly through Viljoen’s recollections pulled from an interview author John Carlin conducted with him. The focus is on Viljoen, how he agreed to head the “white resistance”, how his twin brother helped broker the talks, and how Viljoen ultimately came to think of Mandela as “the greatest of men”. The story also serves to underpin what made Mandela capable of fostering this respect even from an enemy.

Continue reading

Diving for Seahorses: Exploring the Science and Secrets of Human Memory

December 8, 2018 /

diving for seahorses coverBy Hilde Ostby & Ylva Ostby

Review by E. Kirshe

Diving for Seahorses is a collaboration between sisters: the writer and editor Hilde Ostby and the clinical neuropsychologist Dr. Ylva Ostby; a necessary team, as this book artfully explores the history of human knowledge regarding memory.

 

The book takes its name from the hippocampus. As explained in the first pages, an Italian doctor named it the hippocampus (Latin for horse sea monster) back in 1564. This is the seahorse we’re diving for. This metaphor is stretched throughout the book (sometimes a little too thin, but it works).

 

This was an overall fascinating read. Anyone who has ever had an interest in learning more about the human brain, and of course specifically memory, will enjoy this book.

Continue reading

Holiday Gifts For Book Lovers 2018

November 28, 2018 /

It’s that time of year again. As book lovers, we believe that a book is always the perfect present. Whoever you’re looking for, there’s something on this list for them. We aimed for more obscure or lesser-known titles, as well as our favorite new releases from 2018. If you pick a book from this list, the odds are pretty good they don’t already have it – either because it just came out so they haven’t gotten a chance, or because it’s not on their radar.

Did you, like us, forget that Hanukkah starts December 2 this year? Most of the books on our list are available online with one- to two-day shipping – so no matter what holiday you celebrate, there’s a perfect last-minute gift for you in here somewhere. (You can also check out our picks from last year.)

Continue reading

Book Review: Idyll Hands (Thomas Lynch #3) by Stephanie Gayle

November 25, 2018 /

Idyll Hands book Stephanie GayleReview by E. Kirshe

 

In Idyll Hands, police investigate two unrelated cold cases involving missing girls. Set in 1999, a body is found in the woods of Idyll, Connecticut. The murder is thought to be connected to a cold case from years earlier. Idyll Chief of Police Thomas Lynch agrees to put part-time cop Michael Finnegan on the case– if he allows the bored Lynch to look into the disappearance of Finnegan’s sister, missing since 1972.

 

The book is something of a slow burn. Stephanie Gayle really makes the reader appreciate the work that goes into solving a crime with little information- especially in a 1999 police station where typewriters are still used. Tracking down witnesses who haven’t thought about these crimes in decades and suspects who may no longer be recognizable makes for some engaging long-form police work.

Continue reading

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