Published: 9/15/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Writers like to write about writers. Sometimes when that happens, however, the work reads as if they're writing for writers. Considering the resounding "write that which you know" mantra, it's hard to blame them. But when the work doesn't cross over, and most fails for some reason or other...[MORE]
Published: 7/7/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
It's great northern air. Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration. Fine country. Good color, good northern atmosphere, absolute freedom, no summer resort stuff and lots of paintable stuff. —Ernest Hemingway to his friend Jim Gamble, 1919 For Ernest Hemingway, nort...[MORE]
Published: 7/7/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Picturing Hemingway's Michigan Michael R. Federspiel Wayne State University Press (Painted Turtle), $40, 200 pp. This past Fourth of July weekend, thousands of people from Chicago and its surrounding suburbs, such as Oak Park, holidayed at quaint bed-and-breakfast houses, new and rickety resorts,...[MORE]
Published: 6/23/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
"It's a bastard child who won't be invited to dinner anywhere," Bill Harris says of his latest work, Birth of a Notion (or The Half Ain't Never Been Told). He does so with a warm laugh, knowing too well there's no correct or clear shelf on which Notion belongs at the bookstore. But this bo...[MORE]
Published: 6/2/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
The World Has Changed Conversations with Alice Walker Edited with an introduction by Rudolph P. Byrd The New Press, $25.95, 339 pp. Here we have an exceptionally unusual biography, if we can even call it that. A lineage of Alice Walker interviews conducted by a succession of writers from 1973 to...[MORE]
Published: 5/26/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Leave it to John Waters to write what is perhaps the first loving, learned homage to outsider pornographers. In one chapter of his new memoir, Role Models (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 320 pp.), Waters introduces Bobby Garcia, "the Almodóvar of Anuses, the Buñuel of Blow Jobs, ...[MORE]
Published: 2/3/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men by John A. Rich Johns Hopkins University Press, $24.95, 232 pp. Tayvon pulls his shirt back down after showing me the scar that extends below his waistband to his groin and up to his sternum. About an inch wide, raised, ...[MORE]
Published: 1/27/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
How Many Licks? (or, How to Estimate Damn Near Everything) by Aaron Santos, Ph.D. Running Press; 175 pp. In your entire life, how many times will you poop? And if you collected it all, how much would it weigh? Would it all fit in a train car? What about an Olympic-size swimming pool? I think abou...[MORE]
Published: 1/20/2010
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
In 1944 "a very strange screw of events began to turn," Jack Kerouac later reflected about the life-changing paths among rebellious writer friends. That year, Kerouac lived briefly with his first wife, Detroit-born Frankie Edie Parker. While in New York, Edie's network of friends helped to...[MORE]
Published: 11/25/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Full disclosure: Two of the books I'm enthusiastically endorsing this year — Harvey Kubernik's Canyon of Dreams: The Magic & Music of Laurel Canyon (Sterling, $29.95) and Robert Hilburn's Cornflakes With John Lennon & Other Tales from a Rock 'N' Roll Life (Rodale, $24.99) — were ...[MORE]
Published: 11/25/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Real Life & Liars by Kristina Riggle Avon A-HarperCollins, $13.99, pp. 327 Playing off the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina — "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" — Grand Rapids-based Kristina Riggle sweeps readers into a...[MORE]
By W. Kim Heron
Published: 11/25/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue 1957-1965 by Sam Stephenson Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 270 pp. Sounds like a novel plot, doesn't it? In the late '50s, a world-famous (and drug-addicted) photographer retreats to a Manhattan building at the artsy in...[MORE]
Published: 11/25/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
For a city that's shrinking, Detroit sure gets a lot of play on the bookshelves. From appealing photographic books to auto histories to poetry anthologies, there's plenty of paper to stuff a stocking with this year. Take Up the Rouge! (Wayne State, $34.95), for instance. Former Freep journo and act...[MORE]
Published: 11/4/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
The Slasher Killings: A Canadian Sex Crime Panic, 1945-1946 by Patrick Brode Wayne State University Press $22.95, 232 pp. In the mid-1940s, Windsor, Ontario, was a freewheeling incubator of vice. Troops returning from the war were welcomed home with a bevy of booze, houses in which to play...[MORE]
Published: 10/21/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Local photographer Thomas Weschler — who officially served as Bob Seger's road manager from 1969 through 1973 — had unlimited access to Seger and his camp for several decades, both during and after his official managerial duties. In other words, Weschler was there, almost like a fly on t...[MORE]
Published: 10/14/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
When was the last time you met a kid in middle or high school who was actually in shop class? I can't remember, and I have a 16-year-old sister. Information technology is at the forefront of American education, but those jobs are mostly sent overseas, so where does that leave the office worker? How ...[MORE]
Published: 8/26/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Though they have similarly rabid fan bases, you would never expect to find the worlds of Jane Austen and George A. Romero forcibly colliding, but collide they do, brilliantly in the ultimate postmodern mashup. Purists will be aghast that some artistic travesty has been committed here, but curious ru...[MORE]
Published: 7/29/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents His Hollywood Years by Cari Beauchamp Alfred A. Knopf, $35, 506 pp. For Joseph P. Kennedy, success meant just one thing: More. More money, more power, more press, more sexual conquests, more brilliantly orchestrated yet shady business deals, and more respect and fame...[MORE]
Published: 7/1/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
He pursued the story as a son, curious about why his mother hid the existence of her sister, and as a journalist, navigating bureaucracies, locating records and interviewing people who might explain both the social and cultural forces at work on his mother and what his aunt's life was like locked aw...[MORE]
Published: 5/6/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
These stories of love and heartbreak, suffering and survival on the Underground Railroad are rooted in oral history traditions. But with Betty DeRamus' deft touch for prose and journalistic attention to historical records, they flourish as a modern, relevant book, Freedom by Any Means: Con Gam...[MORE]
By Curt Guyette
Published: 4/15/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt, 1996 As with the current economic meltdown, the aftereffects of 1929's crash were felt around the world. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Frank McCourt provides an unflinching look at the horrific conditions of his childhood in Ireland during the Great Depres...[MORE]
Published: 4/15/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Lots of people don't realize it, but, during the Great Depression, Detroit finally became a genuine literary location, thanks to writers who came to town to document the economic upheaval in a working-class town. And they left stories that shed light on the city during those troubled times, wi...[MORE]
Published: 3/11/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Dream House by Valerie Laken Harper Collins Publishers, $24.95, 333 pp. In her debut novel, Dream House, Valerie Laken tells it like it is: Personal fulfillment can only come from within, not via corporeal means.Candidly reflecting on the sacrifices people make to maintain, achieve or, in som...[MORE]
Published: 2/18/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
It's a damn-near-balmy Thursday night (for February, in Detroit), and 50 or so folks have gathered at Oak Park's Book Beat. They're seated on folding chairs before a lanky, bespectacled, clean-headed, soft-spoken dude in an Army surplus jacket and jeans who's suddenly been transformed into an el...[MORE]
Published: 2/11/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing by Daniel Bergner Ecco, $24.95, 224 pp. In his new book, Daniel Bergner delves into five lives that few would be able to call less than extreme erotically, and in the most extreme of these, criminally disturbing. T...[MORE]
By Tim Kreider
Published: 2/4/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
A girl I once caught reading Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: "You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old." I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniabl...[MORE]
Published: 1/28/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Dead Dancing Women by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Midnight Ink, $13.95, 370 pp. Michigan author Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli took the "write what you know" adage to heart when wrote the first book of her Emily Kincaid Mystery series, Dead Dancing Women.The background of protagonist Emily Kincaid pract...[MORE]
Published: 1/28/2009
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Dead Dancing Women by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli Midnight Ink $13.95, 370 pp. Michigan author Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli took the old "write what you know" adage to heart when she set out to write the first book of her Emily Kincaid Mystery series, Dead Dancing Women. The background of p...[MORE]
Published: 12/31/2008
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Behind the Bedroom Door Edited by Paula Derrow Delacorte Press 334 pp., $25 If you're looking for stories that sizzle like one of those erotica collections you place next to the penis cake at a bachelorette party, don't read this book. Magazine editor Paula Derrow has put together a co...[MORE]
Published: 12/10/2008
Types: Arts, Literature, Books
Tomorrow by Graham Swift Knopf; $23.95, 255 pp. If you enjoy rambling, outsized ruminations of a self-centered, somewhat paranoid, middle-aged woman, then seek out Brit author Graham Swift's Tomorrow. The novel revolves around the early morning hours of "tomorrow," in which the main characte...[MORE]
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