Looking for Alaska by John Green Looking For Alaska is apparently a young adult book. That I had no idea of this fact until I checked some of the book’s details on Amazon is perhaps testament to the quality of the book, or to my own idiocy. As usual, the answer probably lies somewhere in […]

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber by Julian Rubinstein Attila Ambrus is king. True, he may not do so well with relationships. And his hockey goalie skills may leave much to be desired (though not his dedication), and he may have something of a compulsive personality when it comes to drinking and gambling. But when it […]

The Memory of Runningby Ron McLarty …is decent, and readable, but too calculating for my tastes. (Put another way, the film rights to the book were optioned to Warner Bros. for 7 figures, and it shows.) This is a book you’re supposed to like. The plot is strange, but not too strange. Some characters are […]

Pete Hamill’s Downtown is billed as something of a historical and personal portrait of New York City, though that’s almost unfair. The book is historical—rooted in history—but it’s much more than that. Hamill boils it down in his first sentence: “This is a book about my home city.”* Which, it is and it isn’t. Downtown […]

I thought maybe an immense review would be appropriate, but ultimately decided against it. My review of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is as follows: Infinite Jest is an atrocious waste of space.

Atlantic City. Ah, Atlantic City. Boardwalk Empire, in telling the unlikely story of Atlantic City’s rise from unpopulated sandy dunes to highly populated, brightly flashing casinos, tells a story that’s quite interesting, if you’re into the whole beach development/political corruption/materialistic greed sort of thing. It’s a story of graft, but with a nostalgic tilt. All […]

In Bad Comma, Louis Menand takes Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves) to task for her peculiar and highly idiosyncratic application of punctuation. The revelation of how wrong Truss is, by itself, is comical (at times), but it’s unfair to say that Menand writes about nothing else; the entire article is insightful, engaging […]

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches is a fun romp by everybody’s favorite anthropologist, Marvin Harris. It looks at behavior that seems illogical to an outside observer—the sacred cow, the hated pig (and even the loved pig), the potlach, and so on—in an attempt to explain away the riddles. There are numerous chapters (as there are […]

I made a pretty valiant effort to read Peter Conrad’s Modern Times, Modern Places. It seemed like a good idea at the time; a book about all the wonderful things of the 20th Century, what’s not to like? Movies, literature, philosophy, war… seriously, what’s not to like? And plus, it was on sale dirt-cheap at […]

In The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler takes the subjects of urban planning, the American Dream, and cars, crafting from them a surprisingly witty, irreverent, and at times cantakerous assault on the state of place in modern society. These are topics, mind you, for which Kunstler is able to marshal no small amount of vitriol. […]