he Blizzard Voices, Ted Kooser’s stirring and innovative collection of poetry recording the devastation unleashed on the Great Plains by the blizzard of January 12, 1888, has been selected for inclusion in the 2007 Book Sense Poetry Top Ten. This list is compiled by independent booksellers throughout the U.S. and publicized by Book Sense both in print and online. Published as a Bison Books edition in 2006 by the University of Nebraska Press, The Blizzard Voices is based on the actual reminiscences of the survivors of the Blizzard of 1888 as recorded in documents from the time and written reminiscences … Continue reading The Blizzard Voices makes Book Sense Poetry Top Ten List

his is a beautiful book and one you should read.

Oh, did you want more of a review than that?  Okay.  Beggars in Spain follows the life of Leisha Camden, daughter of millionaire business man Roger Camden who railroaded a research group into letting him buy their newest experiment, a genetically altered daughter who never sleeps.  Before you start thinking Frankenstein, stop.  Leisha and the other sleepless are fine.  Except they are not.

They are smarter, faster, and ultimately live longer than the rest of us.  There is a backlash against these superior humans.  The research company quickly learns to be careful who the parents are and that they can handle the stress of a baby who never sleeps.  Twenty-four hours of crying is enough to make any parent snap. 

Continue reading “Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress”

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism by Joan Acocella “Acocella’s most extensive defense of an artist vis-à-vis her biographers and critics is the wickedly entertaining Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, following by a year her work of investigative reportage, Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, in which, armed with statistics, interviews, and a Menckenesque zest for combat, she is on the attack on virtually every page. Her slender book on Willa Cather is both an overview of the writer and a skewering of numerous proprietary “interpretations” of her work by commentators who see in Cather what … Continue reading Praise for Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir by Dinah Lenney “On September 17, 1997, Nelson Gross, a one-time Senate hopeful, was kidnapped by three teenage boys and brutally murdered; with the money they stole from him, they purchased jewelry, clothes, and hubcaps. Bigger than Life is an account of the murder, written by Gross’s daughter, Dinah Lenney, an actor who lives in Echo Park. Although the abduction made national news, the book is less about the tragedy than about what such events do to the survivors. The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with … Continue reading Praise for Bigger than Life

To the Last Salute: Memories of an Austrian U-Boat Commander by Georg von Trapp “[von Trapp] almost certainly always tried to put his best foot forward, and he emerges from his account as a man of great skill, considerable compassion . . . and sufficient tact and tolerance to handle the kind of polyglot crews that sailed for the Dual Monarchy. [H]e became the highest scoring Austro-Hungarian submariner, despite equipment that was sometimes more dangerous to him and his men than to the enemy. He fought on to the end, knowing that the Dual Monarchy he served so well was … Continue reading Praise for To the Last Salute

Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds by Clark Ashton Smith “Jeff VanderMeer, who introduces the Nebraska reprints of Smith’s first two major collections of stories, admits to a love-hate relationship with the writer, largely because of his overlush and ‘hyperelevated’ style. And yet without it, Smith couldn’t create the dark beauty and alluring otherness of his best work. If you’ve never read Clark Ashton Smith before, start with either the collection A Rendezvous in Averoigne or the reissues of Out of Space and Time and Lost Worlds.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World Continue reading Praise for Clark Ashton Smith