Robert Polidori edited by Elizabeth Culbert Steidl ($75.00) by David Taylor Many viewers will have seen Robert Polidori's photographs in magazines such as The New Yorker, and may remember them as sharp illustrations of urban landscapes, artistic documents of the incontrovertibly real. Those fortunate enough to have seen his work in a gallery setting may […]
Federico Zeri & Marco Dolcetta translated by Diana Sears| NDE Publishing ($14.95 each) by Kelly Everding It seems a basic human need to glean the greatest achievements in any given medium into a tidy list, usually the round figure of one hundred, especially at the end of a century. We like to mop up the […]
Julia Kasdorf Johns Hopkins ($26) by Sarah Fox Julia Kasdorf is the author of two collections of poems, The Sleeping Preacher, published in 1992 and Eve's Striptease, published in 1998. This new book—a more literal "collection" of essays, poems, photographs, and other illustrations—ostensibly attempts to examine aspects of Mennonite life from her personal experience as […]
David Wojahn University of Arkansas Press ($21.95) by Susan Smith Nash David Wojahn has to be one of the crankiest poet-critics alive. Even at his most glowing, he counterbalances his observations with the occasional barb or wry comment. This is not to say his arguments are unfounded, although he is fairly clunky in hinting that […]
Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price Basic Books ($32.50) by Jane S. Van Ingen After Frank Kameny lost his federal government job in 1957 and the Supreme Court sided with the feds, he fought back and became one of the first gay rights advocates. But working tirelessly on behalf of gay and lesbian issues for 40 […]
Renata Adler St. Martin's Press ($26.95) by Rumaan Alam It's never a particularly illuminating strategy to open a review of a book by quoting another review. Still, it's worth noting that in his New York Times Book Review essay on Renata Adler's most recent book, Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media, Bill […]
Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel James Fallows Public Affairs ($25) Air Rage: Crisis in the Skies Anonymous and Andrew R. Thomas Prometheus Books ($20) by Peter Ritter James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent, is flying his private airplane on a transcontinental jaunt when he's hit by a revelation: […]
edited by Paul Auster Henry Holt ($25) by Sarah Fox I Thought My Father Was God anthologizes 179 stories (plus one story quoted in its entirety in the Introduction) culled from the 4,000 Paul Auster received after inviting listeners of National Public Radio to participate in the "National Story Project" by sending "true stories that […]
Edward Foster Spuyten Duyvil ($12) by John Olson I knew a witty physician who found theology in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. —Ralph Waldo Emerson I do not pretend to […]
Trevor Joyce Shearsman Books ($15) by Harriet Zinnes To consider the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet Trevor Joyce one must start with a biographical fact: Joyce stopped writing poetry for about 20 years. And the reason was not biological: he did not have a strange disease, a fever, a loss of memory or a […]