What is the nature of love, and how can it transform our lives?

Writers have tackled that question for centuries, but Paulo Coelho makes a worthy contribution to that tradition in his 2006 novel By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Coelho offers a relatively brief but intensely thoughtful rumination.

“Rarely do we realize we are in the midst of the extraordinary,” Coelho writes. “Miracles occur all around us, signs from God show us the way, angels plead to be heard….” In fact, he says God gives us each one “magic moment” every day to change our lives, but most people don’t notice those moments or they’re too afraid to take advantage of them.

“But that moment exists,” he says—“a moment when all the power of the stars becomes a part of us and enables us to perform miracles.” Full Story »

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford
Makers, by Cory Doctorow

Years ago, when we lived in the middle of New Jersey, I managed to get myself elected to the local school board, mostly by accident. This wasn’t exactly the plan—it was the incumbents, and me, and I just did it so that there would be a contested election. To my surprise, I got elected. And one of the first things I got to do, after dealing with the budget that got voted down that year for the first time in living memory, and the proposal to get rid of the German teacher (which passed), was deal with the proposal to get rid of the shop program and replace it with something that had “technology” in whatever the rubric was, presumably because everyone in the shop classes was now going to become a “knowledge worker.” I spoke against the plan, but I think I lost the argument, which was not unusual. I voted to keep the German teacher, and that didn’t work out either. Full Story »

As soon as I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I wanted to call a “time out” from life and put everything on pause so I could do nothing but read, read, read this unrelenting book.

McCarthy pens a powerful tale of devotion and love set in a post-apocalyptic world of despair and hopelessness, as stripped down and bare as McCarthy’s spare, elegiac prose. I mean, he’s writing bare-bones, devoid of commas and apostrophes and, frequently, even complete sentences. But oh, does he capture images and emotions! It’s almost stream-of-despondent-consciousness from characters who wish they were unconscious.

The story follows a father and young son as they make their way across the barren landscape toward the sea. They’re ostensibly traveling there in the hope of finding better living conditions, but this is, after all, a world without hope. Full Story »

Legacy wants to be more than a novelized comic book: Packaged as a hardcover with a spiffy dust jacket and a promising premise, the novel suggests something that transcends stereotypical comic book shoot-em-up.

But it quickly becomes apparent that the book is not the general-audience thriller it appears to be. Instead, Legacy is the pitch-perfect comic book-as-words. There’s no genre-busting, no in-depth character study, no lyrical prose—nothing that would help it transcend the realm of fanboys. Instead, author Thomas E. Sniegoski writes with both knuckles bare, conjuring derring-do and all-out action on page after page.

At just over 200 pages, Legacy makes for a quick read, particularly since the text is light and the paragraphs are short. It’ll be an entertaining two hours, too—for readers who like comics. Full Story »

Geoffrey Becker’s short stories in Black Elvis have a tendency to leave me scratching my head—but that’s just the point. Becker’s characters are frequently left scratching their heads, too.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Black Elvis collects a dozen of Becker’s stories into a collection that could best be described as a handbook for people trying to find themselves. It’s no “How-To” guide, though; consider it more of a “misery loves company” companion because Becker’s characters find themselves as lost at the end of each story as they were at the beginning.

In the title story, for instance, a blues guitarist who goes by the stage name “Black Elvis” suddenly finds himself supplanted at the local club’s open mic night. Full Story »

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

Full Story »

The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson
by Chris Mackowski* and Kristopher D. White
Thomas Publications

*S&R’s very own Chris Mackowski

Reading The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson is like poring over a treasure chest of family relics as a wise uncle explains the contents. The wise uncles are the authors Chris and Kristopher. These two historians and writers have taken an amazing number of primary and secondary sources and woven a fascinating tale of the last week in the life of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. They report documented events with insights and an obvious love and respect for the topic. Full Story »

Anyone who’s seen Guillermo del Toro’s recent movies—Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies (and a two-part The Hobbit on the way)—probably expect anything spawned by that mind to be boldly imaginative. Del Toro takes risks and he paints large while paying attention to the most meticulous details.

So when del Toro teamed up with Chuck Hogan to write a vampire trilogy, fans understandably expected something crazy, crazy, crazy good.

With the first part of that trilogy, The Strain, fans do indeed get something good—but it lacks the crazy, crazy, crazy.

Full Story »

Got zombies on the brain? Well, it’s better than having them eat your brain, so that’s a plus.

Zombies are a hot pop-cultural property these days. Woody Harrelson’s buddy movie Zombieland has been eating up theaters. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies brought Jane Austen back from the dead to become one of the year’s publishing phenoms. Marvel Comics is now on their umpteeth iteration of a Marvel Zombies franchise that, pardon the pun, doesn’t want to die.

While zombies don’t have the long literary tradition of, say, vampires, there’s been plenty of recent zombie-lit out there to feed your brain. Here are a few recent favorites: Full Story »

If you’ve been attacked by a werewolf and have survived, then you need a copy of Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers’ new book The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten.

While lycanthropy is inconvenient at best and terribly dangerous at worst, Duncan and Powers contend that it’s something a person can successfully manage. Through proper precautions and care—including cages, restraining systems, and livestock—a lycanthrope can live a full, rich, successful life. Otherwise, without the advice offered in the manual, a lyc is doomed to be an object of scorn, attracting mobs of angry, pitchfork- and torch-wielding villagers.

The Werewolf’s Guide works as a humor piece because Duncan and Powers play it straight, with casual matter-of-factness: werewolves are real. Full Story »

As a lifelong comic book reader, I was curious to stumble across Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics at the bookstore one day. That was perhaps a year ago, but I never got around to reading it. Written as a comic book itself, I figured it wouldn’t take me too long to plow through it once I finally picked it up.

Well, confined to bed for a few days, trying to avoid anything that would tax my foggy and phlegm-filled head, I decided to tackle McCloud’s book.

Bad choice and good choice.

Bad choice because it looked deceptively light, but in fact, the book is a pretty heavy-duty, sophisticated look at comic book theory. Yeah, that’s right: “comic book theory.” Full Story »

Yeah, there’s a book called Zombie Haiku, and it’s exactly what you think it is—and I bought it anyway.

Zombies have overridden some nameless city, and a hapless poet falls victim to the plague. As he transforms into the undead, the poet recounts his experience using haiku, three-line poems with five, seven, and five syllables:

Blood is really warm.
It’s like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

When dealing with zombies, one has to suspend disbelief to begin with, but Zombie Haiku takes that suspension to a whole new level. The basic conceit of the book—that a rampaging zombie can somehow write haiku as he’s rampaging—is a tough conceit to accept, even for readers eager and willing to embrace the humor the book offers.

But once a reader gets past that, the book is loads of fun. Full Story »

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened. Full Story »

by Tom Farmer

Life in the Wrong Lane: Why Journalists Go in When Everyone Else Wants Out by Greg Dobbs is a vivid time-travel dispatch from the heyday of big-iron network TV news.
iUniverse, 205pp

“Sadat has been shot. If you can get to Cairo, do it.”

Breathes there a real reporter who would not thrill to this flash, sent June 6, 1981 by ABC News to its forces across Europe? Got to ice that dinner date, honey. Here’s another chance to narrate history… and spend a fresh bucket of money.

Full Story »

“The culture wars are over,” says journalist Charles Pierce, “and the idiots have won.”

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

Full Story »

In his most recent collection of poems, Sestets, Charles Wright manages to capture more in six lines than most poets say in volumes.

The volume’s sixty-six poems, six lines each, read like dazzling meditations (believe me, if any poet is capable of such an oxymoron, it’s Wright). The six-line format gives each poem a haiku-like feel, although Wright doesn’t conform to the haiku meter. That sort of constraint would take away from Wright’s rustic charm—which comes across like a contemplative gentleman farmer sitting on the wide, wooden porch of his mountaintop home, looking out across uncut fields of hay toward the sunset at the far side of a valley. He takes a pipe from his mouth, and in a quiet, even voice, delivers a poem.

“There’s no way to describe how the light splays after the storm, under the clouds/Still piled like Armageddon/Back to the west, the northwest, intent on incursion,” he says in “Outscape.” Full Story »

I’m trying to decide if I want to read the new book by David Denby called Snark, which is just being published here in Britain. It’s apparently a dignified commentary on what’s wrong with the world today, perhaps something along the lines Miss Manners might come up with if she addressed blogging as a cultural phenomenon. But I haven’t read it yet, so I can’t really say if that’s what it is. Denby is a film reviewer for The New Yorker Magazine, which gives him a certain cache as a “New Yorker staff writer.” He has also written some books, one of which chronicled how he lost a bundle of money by being naïve, greedy and stupid (American Sucker), although it’s possible he made some money by writing the book, which also chronicled the failure of his marriage and a near-breakdown—all aspects of David Denby’s life I could probably get by without learning anything about. Another book chronicled his return to Columbia College many decades after graduation to re-take the Great Books courses he had taken as an undergraduate (Great Books). This was a pretty good book, and Denby and I share something in common—we like to re-read great books we read decades earlier. Personally, I think Conrad and Cary hold up pretty well, but Durrell doesn’t, sadly. So far as I know, he does not have a blog.
Full Story »

Poet Ben Doller has all the answers.

The questions are a different matter.

Doller’s poetry collection, FAQ:, from Ahsahta Press, features fifty-one “answers” to unknown questions. Each poem, titled “FAQ:,” begins with the line “Thank you for your question,” but the question hangs in the air unknown—and sometimes, based on Doller’s answers, unknowable.

“I can’t trust myself all night with this question,” Doller writes.

Doller’s answers aren’t tidy, either. Full Story »

A bomb goes off high above the earth, and one second after, the world ends—not in a bang but a whimper.

William Forstchen’s brilliantly disturbing book, One Second After, takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The country has been brought to its knees by three nuclear missiles launched by unknown foes. The power of the attack comes not from the blasts themselves but from the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it emits.

An EMP, Forstchen points out, could completely knock out America’s electrical infrastructure. Miles and miles of high-tension wires would absorb the power of the EMP, magnifying it beyond the ability of virtually any circuit-breaker to stop. Electrical systems would overload. Anything with delicate electrical circuitry—like cars, computers, and even calculators—would be fried.

And in Forstchen’s world, America without power would be hell on earth. Full Story »

It’s an image most Westerners recognize immediately: A lone man standing in the middle of a five-lane street, blocking a line of tanks. Single-handedly, “Tank Man” prevented the tanks from advancing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Tank Man was one of more than a million Chinese students from universities across the country’s capital who converged on the square in April of 1989, demanding democratic reform. The resulting stand-off between students and the government lasted a month and a half and, eventually, led to a military crackdown. As many as 3,600 students died and more than twice that number sustained injuries.

The picture of “Tank Man”—taken by photographer Jeff Widener of the Associated Press—was one of the most famous stories captured during the confrontation. Now, issued to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, comes another compelling story: Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang. Full Story »