BookBrowse Editorial Review
Darwin: A Life in Poems
(10/17/2012)
Padel divides Darwin: A Life in Poems into five chapters, one for each discrete stage of his life. Chapter Two, which addresses his travels on the H.M.S. Beagle, pulsates with rich, sensuous imagery that echoes Darwin's enchantment with the natural world. In a parallel to Shannon's encounter with the angelically blossoming tree, Darwin, exploring a Brazilian rainforest, has his own arboreal revelation: "Bristles of orchid leaves on every black branch/like green flames over Bibles./
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Half-Finished Heaven: The Best Poems of Tomas Tranströmer
by Tomas Tranströmer
(11/17/2011)
When Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize in October 2011, he had been writing and publishing for over half a century. His work has displayed a remarkable consistency throughout the past sixty years, not because he has failed to evolve but because the poems that he wrote as a young man in the 1950s and 60s reveal a maturity and self-confidence that have only increased with time. Tranströmer's early work doesn't read like a trial run for later greatness or an attempt to find a distinctive voice; the g
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
by Paul Hendrickson
(11/17/2011)
Hemingway's Boat is well-written and rigorously researched, but it's an exhaustive and exhausting read. While I appreciate that Hendrickson has chosen to frame Hemingway's last 30 years through his love of fishing and spending time on the water, the sheer volume of information on types of fish, fishing gear, and boating lore tends to detract from the narrative itself. I doubt that most readers, even Hemingway scholars, want to know the complete history of the shipyard that built Hemingway
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem
by Harold Schechter & Kurt Brown (editors)
(10/19/2011)
Even for those readers not drawn to the often-gruesome depictions on display here, Killer Verse, like all the Everyman collections, offers an excellent primer on the cornucopia of forms available to poets. The editors have carefully chosen something to appeal to everyone: anonymous murder ballads dating back centuries; the immaculately crafted first person monologues of Victorian poets Robert Browning and Thomas Hardy; Tony Barnstone's contemporary sonnets dedicated to pulp fiction themes
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell
(9/7/2011)
While Once upon a River does occasionally come close to leaning on clichés, it also boasts a narrative momentum and attention to nature that complements those patches of well-worn familiarity. In fact, reading this novel often feels like cozying up with a comfortable quilt, one with a few burrs sticking out just to keep things interesting.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Steve Earle
(6/15/2011)
There's something endearingly old-fashioned about Steve Earle's debut novel I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive, a tale with a straightforward beginning, middle, and end, punctuated by spectral showdowns and heavenly healings. While it will likely appeal most to music fans eager to see how this iconoclastic singer/songwriter will fare in the literary sweepstakes, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive deserves praise for the way it captures both the squalor and the community spi
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The White Woman on the Green Bicycle: A Novel
by Monique Roffey
(5/12/2011)
Seamlessly integrating political issues involving race, colonialism, and the legacy of slavery with the more personal conflicts that Sabine and George experience in their marriage, Roffey crafts a novel whose epic scope - the action spans 50 years and is broken down into temporal sections: 2006, 1956, 1963, and 1970 - belies its intimate perspective.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Journal of a UFO Investigator: A Novel
by David Halperin
(3/24/2011)
I might have laughed if someone had told me that it was possible to write an enthralling and deeply sad meditation on adolescence and Judaism in the guise of a novel that includes futuristic spacecraft, bug-eyed aliens, and conspiracy theories, but Journal of a UFO Investigator is that book. As the lone Jewish boy at his school, Danny subsequently embarks on an interior journey where he meets a trio of likeminded co-conspirators, and our hero undergoes a remarkable transformation that not
BookBrowse Editorial Review
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face-Blindness and Forgiveness
by Heather Sellers
(2/3/2011)
While the latter half of the book occasionally wobbles in its attempt to address both narrative strands, the approach works well overall, unifying what could have been two distinct memoirs into a generally satisfying whole... In the midst of painful circumstances that would have broken some people, the author displays a grace and wisdom that allows her to navigate the world with a renewed sense of vision.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Selected Poems by Amy Clampitt
(11/17/2010)
Amy Clampitt relished the chance... to reveal the immense power that words have to create the world instead of merely explaining it. Seeing, for Clampitt, encompassed all five senses: her poems, like the flora she loved so much, run rampant with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures, and a rich harvest awaits anyone who delves into this selection of her best work... [she] brought a fresh way of seeing to American verse, and this edition, despite a few shortcomings, abundantly displays the
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Ada Poems by Cynthia Zarin
(10/20/2010)
Reading Vladimir Nabokov's six-hundred page magnum opus, Ada, is much like climbing to the top of a monument, say, Washington, D.C.'s famous obelisk, or Prague's Astronomical Clock Tower: the steep, vertiginous ascent ultimately pays off in a breathtaking view of the landscape below, a landscape you have traversed within the twin cocoons of stairwell and elevator, or in this case, sentence and paragraph, to reach a glorious summit. In other words, it's not a beach read. Cynthia Zarin's bo
BookBrowse Editorial Review
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
(7/8/2010)
Rock music is notoriously difficult to write about, especially in fictional form, where literary platitudes and rhapsodic discursions often fall short of the transformative experience of actually listening to the music. Egan succeeds, though, by offering pithy observations on the sterility of digital remastering ("The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh") and the overwhelming power
BookBrowse Editorial Review
What Becomes: Stories
by A. L. Kennedy
(4/7/2010)
Towards the end of the title story in this bleak yet bracing collection, a man delivers a haunting interior monologue about how people cope, or fail to cope, with loss: "Our town is full of people running back and forth in torn days and every other town is like that, too. Our world is thick with it, clotted in patterns and patterns of grief." In the remaining eleven stories, A.L. Kennedy goes on to depict such towns, such characters, all dealing in their own complex and eccentric ways with despa
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
(3/3/2010)
Skloot strikes a tricky balance between inserting herself into the narrative and stepping back to let the Lacks family, the heart and soul of the book, tell their stories. For the most part she succeeds... Just as she brings dignity to the individuals who make scientific investigation possible, she also expertly lays out the pros and cons of the current tissue research debate... an engaging introduction to these issues, one that hooks the reader with its emphasis on the real people behind the co
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Too Much Happiness: Stories
by Alice Munro
(11/19/2009)
A remarkable meditation on the themes closest to Munro's heart: hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage, to quote the title of her 2002 collection. Her stories always take the road less traveled to foster epiphanies in their characters and a subtle yet deep satisfaction in the reader... in her unflinching portrayal of misjudgments, accidents, and serendipitous exchanges, Munro has crafted a dark masterpiece.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Love and Summer: A Novel
by William Trevor
(10/7/2009)
Anyone drawn to the title and expecting a Nicholas Sparks/Bridges of Madison County-style romance should approach with caution, but those who appreciate exquisitely paced narratives and keen emotional insights will relish this bracing examination of love and its limits.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Big Machine: A Novel
by Victor LaValle
(9/23/2009)
While Big Machine contains encounters with the sorts of angels and demons that skeptical readers might think belong more in a Dan Brown thriller than a literary novel, these supernatural elements expertly rub shoulders with realistic depictions of childhood fears, drug addiction, and the ramifications of religious faith. Indeed, the extraordinary and the ordinary intertwine so successfully that it’s impossible to imagine the book stripped of either; this isn’t a realist novel overlaid wit
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Lake with No Name: A True Story of Love and Conflict in Modern China
by Diane Wei Liang
(8/12/2009)
Poetic reflection defines this moving memoir that deftly weaves the personal and political into a shining braid. Diane Wei Liang has written a lament for her homeland, one that teems with regret for what could have been.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
(7/8/2009)
One of Adichie’s greatest gifts is her ability to sketch the lives of her characters (mostly women), and to limn the differences between Nigeria and the United States with a few telling details... A lesser author would take the easy road of broadly painting these cultural differences so that one culture came across as superior to the other, but Adichie seldom falls into this trap.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore
by Wendy Moore
(5/21/2009)
Moore clearly knows how to resurrect history from dry names and dates, and vividly recreates this eerily familiar era with a historian's love for detail and a storyteller's passion for a good yarn. Her wide-ranging knowledge of 18th-century medicine, marriage customs, birth control, child-bearing and rearing, botanical discoveries, and the first glimmers of suffrage always illuminate the subject without bogging down the fast-paced narrative.
BookBrowse Editorial Review
Doghead: A Novel
by Morten Ramsland
(4/1/2009)
While Ramsland has received comparisons to John Irving and other writers lauded for using magical realism within the context of a family saga, his writing most aptly conjures an anarchic, more salacious version of Astrid Lindgren, the Swedish author best known for creating Pippi Longstocking.
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