The Furious Gazelle

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Category: Review (Page 5 of 9)

Book review: My Life With(Out) Ranch by Heather Wyatt

November 10, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

I have a confession to make: even though I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m somewhat obsessed with books about diet. My Life With(Out) Ranch by Heather Wyatt is a fairly fun, uplifting read. She writes about how to be kind to yourself while also working towards making healthier decisions.

Born out of a blog of the same title, My Life With(Out) Ranch is told in a bloggy, conversational style. The book is structured through chapters which each focus on a different aspect of the weight-loss journey such as self-worth, romance, exercise, and dealing with the judgement of others. Wyatt includes a few tangentially-related recipes at the end of every chapter, ranging from the healthy (zucchini noodle pad thai) to lower cal versions of junk food, like ranch dressing cut with buttermilk.

Though this book is about Wyatt’s weight loss journey, anyone who’s trying to change their eating and exercise habits for health can use her motivational and relatable advice. In the chapter on exercise, for example, she shares the story about how she went from never having run at all to completing a half marathon. She wrote about the training with humor, including her train of thought on her very first run: Continue reading

Book Review: Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner

November 3, 2018 /

Buffy Sainte Marie Andrea Warner

Review by Tess Tabak

In this volume, Andrea Warner paints a heartbreaking-yet-inspiring picture of Buffy Sainte Marie, the folk rock legend who’s mostly been erased from music history. Blacklisted by two US presidents, Buffy was an outspoken woman of color, and an activist, exactly the type of person that gets willfully forgotten.

When my baby boomer aunt saw this book, her face lit up. “I love Buffy!” she said. “Whatever happened to her?”

This book answers that question. Buffy only had one or two records that achieved hit status in the US. She never stopped producing music after that. However, much of her later works were not commercial successes, deemed too experimental. Other of her songs were covered by, and later attributed to, more famous musicians, including “Until It’s Time for You to Go,” a song Elvis Presley famously covered and allowed his fans to think he had written.

There’s even more to the story of why Buffy exists in relative obscurity today, despite being one of the most inventive, original artists of the 60s and 70s. This work makes a case for Buffy as one of the musical greats of the 60s. Continue reading

Book Review: You Are the Everything by Karen Rivers

October 29, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

In You are the Everything, a new YA novel by Karen Rivers, a high school student struggles to piece together her life following a horrific event.

Elyse Schmidt has always wanted to date Josh Harris, but he’s never noticed her. However, now that they’re the sole survivors of a plane crash, they begin to bond. Elyse finally has everything she wanted. All it took was the death of her best friend, everyone in her marching band class, and some 200-odd strangers.

If you’re looking for a YA novel as some kind of escape/fantasy, you’re in the wrong place.You are the Everything deals with some tough stuff: grief, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt. However, even though I generally fall into the “escapism/pleasure” YA camp, I sort of enjoyed reading this book.

Enjoy is the wrong word. This book is a bit like a plane crash: it’s bright, shiny, impossible to look away. I read the whole thing fairly quickly (though this may have something to do with the fact that I was on an airplane at the time). (On that note – Do not read this book on a plane. In about 5 minutes I went from “Oh cute! They’re on an plane too!” to “Oh no! I’m on a plane too.”) Continue reading

Book Review: See All The Stars by Kit Frick

October 24, 2018 /

Review by Dan Tarnowski

see all the stars kit frick

See All The Stars is a debut work of YA fiction by Kit Frick. It is billed as “part love story, part suspenseful thriller.” The blurb describes an intense and complex coming-of-age story involving four teenage women. “What happened then to make Ellory so broken now?” The plot follows headstrong Ellory’s life between “then” and “now.”

The chapters of the 305-page young adult fiction novel alternate back and forth between “then” and “now”, past and present. The “then” chapters recap Ellory’s junior year of high school in bits and pieces, and the “now” chapters depict her subsequent senior year, showing the aftermath of “then.”

The fractured plot makes the book somewhat slow to build steam, especially as most of the story is told through Ellory’s thoughts, thus turning fiction’s “show rather than tell” convention  upside down. As the groundwork for the “then and now” plot is laid, we learn about Ellory’s group of friends, her high school routine, and her unique relationship with her best friend, Ret. Kit Frick’s poetic language is displayed from the get go, and this voice, part image-heavy, part wittily penetrating observer, becomes a compelling layer in the world of See All The Stars (“The green flecks in his eyes flashing like marble glass signaling yes, yes, yes”). Continue reading

Book Review: The Dying of the Light by Robert Goolrick

October 17, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

The Dying of the Light is a sumptuous feast of a book, rich in texture and detail. Robert Goolrick tells the life story of Diana Cooke, the jewel of a dying Southern empire. She and her family invest everything they have, their very souls, into saving their estate, a sprawling house named Saratoga.

Even though Diana’s story contains more tragedy than light, Goolrick’s impeccable eye for detail make this book a pleasure to read. He includes glorious descriptions of the luxuries in Diana’s life: her fine clothing, and the Southern scenery.

“For a moment she stood, freed from her father’s arm as he wheeled himself back from her, until she was alone in the light, eyes lowered demurely, under the hundreds of candles in the seemingly hundreds of crystal chandeliers, the luminous room catching the glitter from her warrior’s tiara, her luminous, flawless skin, and then she bowed her head, her swan’s neck bending so that her chin touched her neck, and made the curtsy that was so elegant, so graceful, it was forever to be named after her.” Continue reading

Book Review: Scribe by Alyson Hagy

October 13, 2018 /

Review by E. Kirshe

Scribe by Alyson Hagy is a fascinating and quick read yet at just under 160 pages this novel packs a lot of story. Hagy’s writing is beautiful, stylistically as the whole book comes off as poetic as well as having that practicality that lets the reader feel like they are really in the landscape of the novel.

 

“Outside, the air was layered with the scents of cooling bark and leaves. The sun flared behind the hill where the Hopkins house lay in ruins, nothing left to scratch the sky but its four stout chimneys. Persimmons. The sunset was the color of persimmons.”

 

And what a strange location it is- set in a harsh dystopian landscape of a post-war, post-pandemic Appalachia the decimated population relies on bartering and brute force to survive.

The unnamed main character trades in words, writing letters for people who seem to think the act can vindicate or more importantly offer them absolution. She’s been living in peace on her family’s lands for years; alliances are kept in place both with the local overseer Billy Kingery and with the group of migrants she allows to live on her land, the Uninvited, a group which seems to almost worship her late sister. When she agrees to write and deliver a letter, something of a confession, for a mysterious man named Hendricks a devastating series of events unfold. Continue reading

Book Review: Sound: A Memoir of Hearing Lost and Found

October 10, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

Sound Bella BathurstIn Sound: A Memoir of Hearing Lost and Found, Bella Bathurst explores what is lost besides sound when we go deaf late in life. A journalistic curiosity coupled with personal experience make this a nuanced look at hearing across a wide range of subjects. She covers not just deafness and the way society treats the deaf, but a look at the mechanics and meaning of sound itself.

Bathurst was working as a journalist when she began to lose her hearing. She noticed that her interview skills suffered when she couldn’t hear subjects as clearly. Worse, she began to isolate herself from friends, unwilling to go out to noisy clubs or restaurants where she’d spend the night struggling to understand a few words. She writes heartbreakingly about her own depression: “I also made the discovery that there’s more than one way to kill yourself. There’s the active way, where you go out to seek death. […] Or there’s the passive way, where you just stand there on the threshold holding the door open.” (117).

However, miraculously, Bathurst regained her hearing after 12 years. Her experience as someone on both sides of hearing loss give her a unique perspective on the subject. Being able to hear again after over a decade of deafness made her appreciate sound. Continue reading

Book Review: Beauty of the Death Cap by Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze

October 6, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

Who knew mushrooms could be so fascinating?

In The Beauty of the Death Cap, Nikonor, the eccentric narrator, states, “I have always preferred the company of trees and mushrooms to that of my fellow humans.” That is the gist of the book. With a wry sense of humor, Nikonor takes us on a rolling journey through his life in mushrooms. He is obsessed with fungi, and has made them his life’s work. The people he meets are another story.

Author Catherine Dousteyssier-Khoze gives us a Nabokovian narrator in Nikonor. The prose is gorgeous, with lines shifting back and forth between French and English that verge on poetry (“Encore que . . . suddenly I am seized with doubt!”). He slowly unveils a narrative, distracted along the way by tangents on everything from mushrooms to Charles Baudelaire’s missed calling as a nature poet, all with a surprisingly sharp sense of humor and a pretentious air. He speaks of death and murder as coldly and carelessly as if he were talking about picking a mushroom, musing things like, “I am a lone wolf by nature. I made the mistake of taking on a partner only once, and the attempt ended in an abject failure—one from which my associate did not recover.” Continue reading

Book Review: No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe

September 29, 2018 /

no place to go cover lezlie lowe

In this delightfully tongue-in-cheek volume, Lezlie Lowe gives us a deep look into human history from an unexpected angle: the elimination of waste. She covers just about every aspect of public toilets you can think of, centered around access – who gets to use them, and who doesn’t.

Access is especially bad for women, Lowe points out, because the overwhelmingly male designers do not take women’s biology into account. Just one of the frustrating facts Lowe delves into is the fact that biologically, women take longer to urinate and need to urinate more frequently on average than men; yet public toilets often have twice as much accommodation for men as for women.

Throughout the book, Lowe covers every population that public toilets fail – people with disabilities, inflammatory bowel disease, the LGBT community, people of color, and the homeless. The lowdown: public toilets fail us because they are mostly designed by young, straight, white, abled men. Continue reading

Book Review: The Dead Still Here, by Laura Valeri

September 27, 2018 /

Review by Shane Meyer

 

“Ice Storm,” one of twelve short stories in Laura Valeri’s collection The Dead Still Here, is a catalog of defeat and despair: two dead daughters (one a victim of cancer, the other of the Iraq War); their parents’ dried-up marriage (Ellie, a work-a-holic, and Duke, an alcoholic); physical and mental disfigurement by war (Duke’s brothers scarred by service in Vietnam and Korea); and the loss of religious faith or even a belief in “goodness.” 9/11 plays a role too. Duke, desperate to escape his toxic circumstances, chases a good feeling to his detriment. “Ice Storm” is a template for the bulk of the stories in the collection for its use of the themes of domestic relationships scarred by loss and the role of the dead in sealing fate.

Another theme is the failure of romantic love. In “Prophecy” the protagonist, Angela, can’t seem to shake her half-interested sex partner, Sean. She goes to a santera who tells her that she’s doomed to this fate. Valeri attributes the infallibility of the prediction to Angela’s unpopularity in high school, her unattractiveness and—despite her professional success—her unshakeable belief that she can woo Sean. In the end, she nearly succeeds but sees her hopes quickly and cruelly dashed: Continue reading

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