June 2008
East Riding
A poem by Jesse Ball
Life is Our Cause
Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon sonically reshaped a generation, and Sheila Weller has talked to almost everyone who saw them do it. Laura Tanenbaum, reviewing Girls Like Us, assesses the job Weller does in letting these women roar.
Erasing All Evidence of Ambition
In the second of two essays, Chad Reynolds adjudges that in The Presentable Art of Reading Absence Wright himself could have stood to evanesce a smidge of his own ego in the course of his “users guide to evanescence”
Getting Off
Ninety years ago, the author of The Birds of Puerto Rico bludgeoned a small boy to death with the help of then-lover Richard Loeb. Steve Donoghue takes readers through Simon Baatz’s For the Thrill of It—in which Clarence Darrow fights the good fight for a couple of very, very bad boys.
Something Better Than a Moral
By showing his readers the unimaginable, Etgar Keret returns us with relief and sobriety to a world we thought we knew. Amelia Glaser interrelates Wristcutters, Jellyfish, and The Girl on the Fridge, illuminating the works of this strange Israeli export.
Living Israel’s History
Partisans on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have trouble reconciling the intricacy of events with their national mythology. Greg Waldmann explains how the Benny Morris of 1948 is both the exception and the rule.
Fairies in New York and Werewolves in London
Courtesy of novelist Martin Millar, there are super-cool werewolves in London, and glam-goth fairies in New York. Sharon Fulton is on their beat and reports back to us of the fantastic intersections of fairy and fairly common.
Peer Review:
Rumble in the Alley
Near the punchbowl, within reach of the finger sandwiches, the early critics of James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning had an oh-so-polite set of things to say about it. Out back in the alley, other critics were ready to pounce. In this regular feature, Sam Sacks officiates between the Sharks and the Jets.
Lady in Waiting
Alison Weir’s new novel The Lady Elizabeth evokes the snakepit of internecine maneuverings, dynastic labyrinths, and the lunges of religious zealotry that characterized the age named for the lady in question. Steve Donoghue’s “Year With the Tudors” continues here.
The Best Intentions
As a startling suicide shows, evil is in the mundane details of Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street. Karen Vanuska follows the novel’s four main characters and tries to tease out the peril beneath their most pedestrian actions.
The Songs of Sing
What defines an anthology? What are the limits of verse? Derek Henderson definitively answers these and thousands of other questions in his detailed and celebratory review of A Sing Economy.
Zoom
There can be no more obvious target in the literary landscape for our poetry editor than a popularly selling book-length poem. With Sharp Teeth, Toby Barlow has dared to write such a thing, and John Cotter has responded accordingly.
Beautiful Corpses
In The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, George Johnson assays the experiments he sees as most elegantly defining the wonder of the scientific method. But with their reliance on chemicals, voltages, and vivisections, are these experiments really “beautiful?” Lianne Habinek straps on her lab goggles and takes a look.
Nunc Dimittis
Ted Sorensen was the most loyal of JFK’s retainers and the last to finally spill the beans about the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Steve Donoghue walks us through the worthy—if somewhat hedging—memoir of an eloquent and haunted man.
Heisenberg Was a Human – Pass it On!
Becka Podlertz decries the blinkered arrogance of all animal researchers, just as she celebrates the unique and thought-provoking contribution of Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford in their new book, Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins
The OLM Quiz:
Do Not Go Gentle!
You couldn’t hack it—you whined and sniveled—and so this month it ends! Dance, ye monkeys of mediocrity!
Lori Parkman is an attorney, flâneuses, and photographer who’s work can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/loriellenp/. She lives in Brooklyn.
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