The Furious Gazelle

Literary as hell.

Category: Review (Page 6 of 9)

Book Review: Untrue by Wednesday Martin

September 22, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

Wednesday Martin paints a grim picture in Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong, and How the New Science Can Set Us Free. She posits that in much of the world, female sexuality has been hemmed in, due to a seemingly innocent cause: agriculture. As early hunter-gatherers, women roamed freely and the practice of multiple sex partners was common. But with the advent of the plough came the myths about female sexuality and gender roles we are taught today: that women are naturally domestic, frail, and monogamous.

The premise is one you might be familiar with – it’s been well-researched, as the NY Times noted. However, Martin infuses the subject with new energy, her own personal perspective, and a modern update, bringing recent developments like vaginal “rejuvenation” into the mix to show just how much gender roles have stayed the same. She discusses modern day adultery through the lens of two anonymous women she interviewed, Annika and Rebecca. One had an affair, and one didn’t, but both came to regret their choices for different reasons. Continue reading

Book Review: The Dinner List by Rebecca Serle

September 19, 2018 /

Review by E. Kirshe

Were you ever asked that old ice-breaker question: if you could have dinner with any five people, living or dead, who would it be? When Sabrina Nielson arrives to her 30th birthday dinner she finds her five picks sitting around the table. Though it’s more or less what I expected, Rebecca Serle’s take on this premise is very well executed and sensitively written.

The Dinner List is bittersweet with moments of levity and heartbreak throughout. It’s a one-night-only therapy session for Sabrina as she navigates her most important past relationships: Robert, the (now deceased) father who abandoned her; Jessica, her somewhat estranged best friend (and her traditional birthday dinner companion); and Tobias, the on-and-off-again boyfriend of basically a decade, for closure and healing. All of this is mediated by her old college professor Conrad, and also, Audrey Hepburn.

The Dinner List mainly digs into Sabrina’s relationship with Tobias, who she still regards as the great love of her life. Occasionally Serle serves up some funny moments, general relationship advice, and all with a bit of magical realism. The Dinner List pulls you through relationships, very human fatal flaws, and explains why those five people made Sabrina’s list- essentially answering who shapes a person’s life.

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Book Review: Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life by Radha Agrawal

September 15, 2018 /

Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life by Radha AgrawalReview by Tess Tabak

A quick yes or no question: Does someone calling themselves a “community architect” make you want to punch things?

If yes, this is not the book for you.

Before anyone accuses me of being cynical, let me say that I wanted to like this book. I actually enjoy reading self help / new agey stuff. But I want them to either tell me something I didn’t know, or at least tell me something I did know in a new way. Most of the information in Radha Agrawal’s Belong: Find Your People, Create Community, and Live a More Connected Life is fairly common knowledge (don’t we all know by now that Facebook is not a substitute for in-person contact?). The exercises feel half-assed – at one point she says, “If you need ideas, Google it.” The amount of doodles and blank journal pages in the book make me think that Agrawal came up about 25% short on the page count, and they went with filler instead of more content.

Worse than that, Agrawal clearly has never experienced, and does not have a deep understanding of, what it truly means to feel alone and friendless. Good for her, but reading this book from such a state is akin to a guide on the Heimlich maneuver that begins, “First, take a deep breath.” What is someone truly friendless supposed to do with advice like “make sure you get 5 hugs a day”? Continue reading

Book Review: Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Johnson

September 8, 2018 /

Review by Mary Rose MacDonald

Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, released in 2008, laments a societal loss of “attention” in the information age. Interpersonal relationships are increasingly impersonal between people tethered to their Blackberrys, iPods, PDAs, cell phones, etc. Author Maggie Johnson warns of a “Coming Dark Age” wherein “we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming, and a perilous melding of man and machine.”

Ten years later, the second edition is enjoying an updated title, Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention. Her language of reclamation and revolution, a taking back of “what one app developer calls our ‘cognitive liberty,’” is refreshing as she cites recent public outcry over mass data breaches, and of popular endeavors to “detox” from devices and digital living. She cultivates a new sense of agency. Dark Age or not, we can constructively grapple with the challenges of the frenetic technological age.    Continue reading

Book Review: Spokes of an Uneven Wheel by Colin Dodds

September 1, 2018 /

In Spokes of an Uneven Wheel, Colin Dodds takes his reader through a journey of incoherence and monotony into a realm controlled by human desire and impulse. Dodds takes measured stabs at everything from corporate hierarchy to Abrahamic religion.

Dodds depicts scene after scene of routine monotony, illustrating that true terror can lie within the abstract systemic confines many of these poems attempt to escape. Dodds crafts narratives that breathe life into the overlooked, such as the subjects in “Hard Surfaces” or the inanimate like in “Landscape Mid-Consequence”: “An asymmetrical face/appears in the exhaust drift/between the taillight and license plate”. Continue reading

Book Review: A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley

August 25, 2018 /

Review by E. Kirshe

 

Jamal Brinkley’s debut book A Lucky Man is a collection of nine excellently written short stories that showcase a deeply thoughtful body of work.

 

The stories are set in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, the city serving as a backdrop for stories where complex familial relationships take center stage, as does black identity, and masculinity. These themes are all  addressed through different stages of life: college aged, middle aged, and young boys serve as narrators throughout the collection.

 

In the first story, “No More than a Bubble,” two college-aged men, Columbia students, attend a party in Brooklyn. The narrator here jumps between the party, and how they fit into it, how he wants to be seen there especially by the women, and who he really is as he thinks of his parents. “We both preferred girls of a certain plumpness, with curves—in part, I think, because that’s what black guys are supposed to like. Liking them felt like a confirmation of possessing black blood, a way to stamp ourselves with authenticity.”  It’s revealed he has a white Italian father and a black mother, something he reflects on through the course of the story as he and his friend follow two girls to their home, moving deeper and deeper into Brooklyn.

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Book Review: Open Me by Lisa Locascio

August 8, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

When a mixup sends Roxana, an 18-year-old girl, to Copenhagen, a mysterious Danish man named Soren whisks her away to live out one of his sexual fantasies.

I’m not quite sure I’d describe Open Me as an erotic novel, even though it’s marketed as such. It contains elements of that genre – the story exists in somewhat of a fantasy state. Through a series of odd circumstances, our heroine is trapped in another country, completely alone, at the mercy of an attractive stranger. But I’m hesitant to label this book erotica. There is a strong sense of the body in this book, but actually very little sex. It dwells more on the protagonist, Roxana, and her growing understanding of what it means to be a woman. She feels a strong desire at the start of the book to be acted upon, to be a completely passive participant in lovemaking. By the end, she learns that passivity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Erotica or not, Open Me is a gorgeously written book. The author, Lisa Locascio, takes impossible-to-describe feelings and puts words to them. Roxana talks about her “cathedral feeling,” the private thrill she felt when hearing music played on a church organ for the first time. The author has an intimate understanding of the inner workings of young girls, and the loneliness of not being able to share those special feelings. When Roxana tries to tell her best friend about the cathedral feeling, a sarcastic comment bursts the bubble. “And again I was a bag of feelings with no start and no end, a tunnel through which sensation moved.” Continue reading

Book Review: This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga

August 1, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

In This Mournable Body, a woman named Tambudzai grapples with the harsh realities of living in Zimbabwe after the Revolution of the 1990s.

The author, Tsitsi Dangarembga, writes on familiar topics (anxiety, existential dread) but set against a backdrop that’s truly harsh and depressing. Tambu is mistrustful of white people living in Zimbabwe – but this isn’t the crystal clear “us vs. them” of books set further in the past, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The white people in this novel are somewhat further removed from the atrocities of their ancestors. In modern Zimbabwe, the lines have blurred. The white people that Tambu loathes haven’t done anything “wrong,” per se, except for profiting off the crimes of previous generations. Tambu acknowledges her advantages – she received a Western education at a prestigious school – but oppression means that she still can’t find a suitable job, unable to tolerate the way that white men steal her work for their own, or how she’s paid far less than her peers just because she’s black. Continue reading

Book Review: 30 Before 30: How I Made a Mess of My 20s, and You Can Too, by Marina Shifrin

July 21, 2018 /

Review by Tess Tabak

When life gives you lemons, it’s time to quit your shitty job, move to Asia, and start fresh. In 30 Before 30, comedian Marina Shifrin shares the story of how she turned her life around with one little list, and a lot of guts. This surprisingly optimistic collection of essays is full of humor, and even offers some advice about living with the reckless abandon of a 20-something that can apply to anyone, no matter your age.

One night in her 20s, Shifrin penned a list of “30 before 30” goals in a night of frustration over her shitty job and life. She found herself drifting after college, unhappy with how little she had accomplished. In a series of 30 essays, she takes us through each goal, and what happened as she tried to achieve them. The list ranges from small (take a bus tour of NYC) to life-changing (“fall in love for real”). Some items seem quirkier than others (such as “learn how to drink”) but they all have a special meaning to Shifrin which she explains. The collection coheres more than you might expect it to – some goals, even seemingly random ones, bring Shifrin closer to reaching big goals, or in some cases made her realize that opportunities she thought she wanted once upon a time aren’t for her anymore. Even when the essays are more standalone, they’re all at heart about growing up, and achieving your dreams.

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Book Review: Eclipse Vol. 1 Written by Zack Kaplan, Art by Giovanni Timpano

July 8, 2018 /

Review by E. Kirshe

 

Eclipse, author Zack Kaplan’s debut work, has a promising sci-fi premise that doesn’t quite find its footing.

 

In Eclipse, Earth’s sun has turned deadly and living things can no longer go out unprotected in daylight or they will be burned to a crisp. Much of the population burned alive the day the sun became deadly and the remaining humans now lead nocturnal lives. One day, a body is found in New York City. The victim was murdered by sunlight- literal writing on the wall says this is the work of a religion-crazed killer.

 

Bax, the main character, is immediately drawn into the narrative because he works outside during the day in an iceman suit. It’s believed the killer must be using one of these suits if he was able to keep a victim outdoors until they burned. Bax teams up with the police to protect the killer’s next target- the teenaged daughter of a solar industrialist.  

 

The plot follows a lot of action story tropes. Grizzly loner with a sad past, Bax, must protect a teenaged girl from a psycho-killer. It’s not super clear why this mostly falls to him and not the police. He occasionally gets information before them and doesn’t share it even though there’s no clear reason not to trust them. There’s a slight corporate criticism element and the killer is a religious fanatic. It’s later revealed that his motivation is mostly that he went crazy (for good reasons) but the event that led to it has no clear motivation by the exposition we get. Also what’s unique about the killer doesn’t seem as important as it should but perhaps that’s explored more in later issues.

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