Washington Black
Washington Black – Esi Edugyan’s tale of a Barbados youth taken by an inventor/scientist to be his slave, only to find that the boy will learn more than to carry scientistic instruments. When the elderly owner of Faith Plantation dies, his nephew inherits the Barbados property and the slaves who toil in its extensive sugar […]
Sweet Promised Land and Robert Laxalt, the Story of a Storyteller
SWEET PROMISED LAND AND ROBERT LAXALT, THE STORY OF A STORYTELLER Aside from Mark Twain’s Roughing It, Robert Laxalt’s, Sweet Promised Land (1957, 2007) is the most perceptively written depiction of Nevada before the Nevada Test Site, and Las Vegas defined the state differently. While Mark Twain wrote his memoir about frontier Nevada in its […]
Old Glory, A Voyage Down the Mississippi
Old Glory, A Voyage Down the Mississippi Who in his right mind would navigate a sixteen-foot, fifteen-horsepower outboard aluminum motorboat down the Mississippi from the Twin Cities to New Orleans? No one. But what Jonathan Raban perhaps lacks in sanity he makes up for with unmitigated chutzpah, incandescent curiosity, and lucid story telling. At age […]
The Bohemians
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature Midway through The Bohemians, Ben Tarnoff describes “the seed of California humor” as “the collision of romance with reality.” The same is true of his new book. Subtitled Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature, this examination of […]
Black Fire
Robert Graysmith is a San Francisco writer best known for his true-crime accounts of serial killers: Zodiac, Unabomber, and Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer. In a way Black Fire is a true-crime story as well. Only this time the crime is arson and the period is historical: eighteen months during 1850 and 1851. […]
A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses
This book, a mere 146 pages of text, is jam-packed with wonderfully offbeat information about a variety of American writers and their homes, now designated museums. Trubeck’s purpose in writing the book was to “expose not simply Whitman’s house, but all of the writers’ house museums as the frauds I believed them to be.” What […]