Books
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Book Review: The Power (Naomi Alderman, 2016)
It’s interesting to note that writer Naomi Alderman was mentored by The Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood, and in that light The Power can be seen as something of a revenge fantasy with The Handmaid’s Tale as inspiration. It also leverages Atwood’s notion of the safe haven of a convent to nurture the development of an emerging power in women. What is this power? Teenage women start to discover an ability to generate electricity within their bodies which soon emerges as a weapon to free them from abusive men, and then find a way to connect older women to this power. At first, the power is an instrument of revenge…
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Book Reviews: What I Read Last Summer
Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, 1966. A long stretch of post-modern fiction with allegories to the Cold War and the liberal college curriculum trends of the 60s. There’s treatment of Western vs. Eastern philosophic approaches to human enlightenment as well. The Goat-Boy struggles with his own bestial origins vs. his aspirations to be a spiritual guide to the undergraduates of an Ivy-League patterned fictional college. A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945. Only around 900 pages of pungent, but surprisingly digestible, reading, and an excellent introduction to Western thought from the ancient Greeks to the German and English philosophers of the mid-Twentieth Century. Russell’s background in mathematics serves to make…
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Review of My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
Quitting: An admission of personal failure, anathema to the quintessentially American spirit of optimism and self-improvement. Fighting for the wrong side is held more admirable than running from the field of battle. Even anti-heroes are heroic to the extent that they strive in their opposition. A life without purpose is not worth living. Quitting is somehow a betrayal of our humanity. The narrator, a privileged, Art History graduate of Columbia University, is fired from her going-nowhere-fast job at an art gallery and she decides to quit—to spend an entire year holed up in her apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, zonked on anti-anxiety and sleeping medications, funded by…
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Review of Factfulness (Anna Rosling Rönnlund, Hans Rosling, and Ola Rosling, 2018)
Rosling was a Swedish doctor, involved in health care in many “third world” regions. His analysis points to data, readily available through the United Nations and the World Health Organization, that proves that overall public health and standards of living across the world have been steadily increasing over the last hundred years, despite sensational news reports of poverty and disease outbreaks to the contrary. Rosling presents the reader with a questionnaire seeking to set an initial level of assumptions that he proceeds to dismantle with truths that challenge the way we digest and understand information. In a world where we are bombarded with “news” sources of wildly different perspectives and…
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Review of Possession (A.S. Byatt)
A mild-mannered literary research assistant comes across previously undiscovered letters from the renowned English poet Randolph Henry Ash which suggest an affair with another poet, Christabel LaMotte. The discovery launches both a modern story of scholarly sleuthing (by the assistant, Roland Michell, and Maud Bailey, a professor at a nearby university and a distant relative of LaMotte) and the circa-1860s romance of Ash and LaMotte. The Victorian story is told via a series of letters and poetry, the evidence that has survived. Byatt’s command of diction in both the historical and modern idioms, and of expression in verse, are impressive. The love affair unfolds as a meeting of sympathetic intellects…
