What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway with its, aristocratic title character Clarissa Dalloway consumed with giving an elegant party, and its author’s long periodic sentences, full of metaphors, allusions, parentheses and interior hesitations? And yet, in a recent essay in The New York Times Book Review, Yale University senior lecturer in creative writing Michael Cunningham provides an introduction to a new issue of Woolf’s book that is so compelling it commands attention. Cunningham‘s own novel The Hours , which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999, pays homage to Mrs. Dalloway . As he reminds readers “The Hours” was Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway – a better choice, I think, because the novel covers a June day in 1923, the hours of which toll away on Big Ben throughout. Virginia Woolf wasn’t the first to adopt a free-association

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Book Review: Mrs. Dalloway

101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya should be required reading for all Peace Corps volunteers and administrators once the 60-year-old federal agency resumes activity — it shut down because of COVID. Meanwhile, the book should also be recommended reading for everyone for what it says about an increasingly important and volatile region of the world. If Hobler had learned in 1968 from Peace Corps personnel and training materials what he writes about now, he would have been much better prepared to acclimate to Libyan culture and to teach English to fifth graders in the remote, impoverished village to which he was assigned. Then again, had he and his fellow volunteers NOT had to learn a lot on their own about Al Gala, an old Berber village 90 miles south of Tripoli — no electricity, no plumbing, significant differences from Western ways — the reader would have been deprived of a lively and instructive account. Because Hobler writes from the perspective of a 75-year

Book Review: 101 Arabian Tales

Nemesis by Philip Roth, published in 2010, eight years before he died, has got to be one of the most subtly instructive elegiac novels written about a widespread raging disease. In this case, polio. In Greek mythology Nemesis was the goddess of indignation and retribution, typically against pride. And yet Roth’s tale is about a young man who is just the opposite of proud. Nemesis is set in the stifling hot summer of 1944 when polio struck this country with renewed vengeance, especially in the Northeast — this was 11 years before the Salk vaccine and 16 before the Sabin. Roth’s fictional narrative tells the story of how the resurgent infantile paralysis virus that had crippled FDR 20 years earlier, affected one of the disease’s epicenters — a small Jewish community in Newark N.J., and, in particular, an adored 23-year-old physical education teacher, Eugene Cantor, known as Bucky, who was working that summer as a playground supervisor. To his shame, Bucky had been exempted from the draft

Book Review: Nemesis

It’s not every day that a 95-year-old-man comes out with an engaging memoir that looks back 80 years to trace the start of a successful theatrical career and a rewarding personal life as a gay man.

Book Review: The Rain May Pass

Prize-winning fiction writer, journalist, and witty, celebrated British bad boy of novels and cultural criticism Martin Amis, 71 now, and a resident of Brooklyn and East Hampton, has just come out with Inside Story. It’s a big autobiographical “compendium” he calls “A Novel” and at other times “life writing” and “a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours.” He says it’s fine if his 538-page book is read in “fitful bursts, with “plenty of skipping and postponing and doubling back,” along with “whatever [we’re] drinking.” That’s good because the book begins with a chatty, familial “preludial” section set in 2016 about being ready to write such a book, and it ends with a digressive “afterthought” on Masada and the Dead Sea, and then an “addendum” about the English novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard who was the second wife of Amis’s father, Sir Kingsley Amis, one of England’s Angry Young Men who took the literary world by storm in the `50s. A sprawling, intensely felt, often

Book Review: Inside Story

Here are two books that offer unique voices on surviving Nazi occupied Europe and have several key plot points in common. Both feature women as the main characters and neither is Jewish. Both works also explore the immigrant experience in the U.S. after the war. But that’s where the similarities end. The first is a memoir. Immigrant Dreams , by Barbara Goldowski, in which the author reflects on when she was a fatherless child living with her small, impoverished family in the medieval town of Dachau. The heart of the memoir focuses on the realization of, Immigrant Dreams , after she arrives in the U.S. as a teenager. The other, a haunting novel called Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman, follows a young widow and mother of an infant daughter during the occupation. The protagonists of both narratives give thanks to their being able to immigrate to this country after the war where each succeeds in finding personal and professional satisfaction, but it’s the novel that most movingly

Book Review: War, Peace and Immigration

Seventy-one-year-old Lucinda Watson, the granddaughter of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and the fourth child of six of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. who ran IBM from 1952-1971, calls her debut collection of poetry The Favorite because, she says, she WAS her father’s favorite, “the pretty one” of five daughters. But in the title poem, “The Favorite” she intimates that although she was “the one chosen to travel /on long trips and / to sleep in his room,/ while everyone else stayed home,” the relationship was fraught with fear and unhappiness. The 24-line free-verse poem segues at line seven into a dark theme that defines many of the poems in this confessional memoir: “Once, my mother dressed me up / like the woman he was sleeping with.” A loaded line that suggests the psychological abuse Watson endured from both parents. And in “Seeing Lake Tahoe” her recollection moves from remembering the brilliance of the “electric blue of the lake and sharp bright harshness of the sun” to seeing in her

Book Review: The Favorite

The screenwriter who penned "Psycho" is quoted as saying that when we watch or read scary stuff we don’t think about the real things that are frightening us. We allow ourselves to be “frightened by fantasy and that’s not only more bearable” than dealing with unbearable reality — it may also help us cope better with crises, be more resilient when preparing for tough times. Maybe. But for sure, an impressive new thriller, "Don’t Look For Me" by best-selling author Wendy Walker seems likely to distract us for a time from the pandemic while also suggesting how we might better manage psychological threats close to home. A tale of nail-biting suspense, "Don’t Look For Me" opens with the foreboding sentence: “The sky grows dark as I drive.” Molly Clarke is inching through a chain of small New England towns littered with old industrial hubs left to decay — neglected farmlands, dilapidated houses, abandoned factories. A hurricane is moving in fast and she’s low on gas. The fog has become

BOOK REVIEW: Don't Look For Me

What literary text could seem further from reality these days than Beowulf — that approximately 1,500-year-old Anglo Saxon verse epic about a Scandinavian hero fighting monsters that’s known mainly by English majors and then, mostly in translation! Yet here are two new Beowulfs, different translations and genres, out this past August, that in their separate imaginative ways have something to say to our troubled times.

Book Review: Two New Beowulf Translations With Something To Say

It’s always challenging to write about a group of short stories: What to mention? In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new collection called Truthtelling, “Pickup” deserves notice because, like the last story in the book, about a page turner of musical scores, it references music, a special love, the author says, that has always informed her writing style. “Pickup,” a good-humored romp, begins with a young woman slumping in front of a hotel, smoking, waiting to visit her father just out of surgery. She spies a big fancy car idling nearby and assumes she’s being taken for a hooker, but what the heck, she climbs in. It turns out, though, that she’s been mistaken for a well known pianist and is being driven to perform a Rachmaninoff piano concerto at Town Hall. Well, she did have piano lessons! She goes along, And out on stage. The story’s a hoot, and representative of how Schwartz’s oddball narratives move. For decades Schwartz has been writing award-winning stories, poems, essays, memoirs,

Book Review: Truthtelling: Stories, Fables, Glimpses

British author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, is best known to American audiences through his popular PBS series Foyle’s War and Midsommer Murders. He’s now out with a new mystery novel. It’s the sequel to his popular work, Magpie Murders. And it’s a doozy!

Book Review: Moonflower Murders

Scott Turow’s been called the king of legal thriller writers – with 30 million books in print, many made into memorable movies, but as his latest work shows, The Last Trial, he should be called a “novelist.” In the old-fashioned, big theme sense of the word. His books -- suspenseful, complex, filled with heady content and dramatic exchanges –are always timely, and none more so than The Last Trial, given the race to discover a vaccine against Covid-19.

Book Review: The Last Trial

Still high on the list of the world’s 100 best novels, Joseph Conrad’s haunting “Heart of Darkness” continues to fascinate, mystify, and attract adaptors. Although Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 award-winning film “Apocalypse Now,” starring Marlon Brando is, arguably, the most imaginative of the lot—moving Conrad’s brooding and inscrutable Congo tale to Vietnam—the 1902 novella inspired earlier films (Boris Karloff as the charismatic Kurtz in 1958, John Malkovich in 1993). “Heart of Darkness” has also been turned into radio dramas, theatre pieces, even an opera. But a graphic novel, a comic book? Why not? as illustrator and cartoonist Peter Kuper might say. He had already taken on adaptations of Franz Kafka and Upton Sinclair, and, as he says in his introduction, which he calls “The Art of Darkness,” he read a lot about the book and showed his work to scholars. He even observes a three-part structure, following the first publication of the novella as a three-part magazine series in 1889.

Book Review: 'Heart Of Darkness'

No way you’re not going to keep reading a book with this opening line: “The captain wore a see-through dress.” Especially when the title of the book is “Scandal on Plum Island” and the author, Marian Lindberg, a journalist and attorney, notes on the cover that it’s a true story. This historical account, however, is not about conspirators’ favorite subject, germ warfare, on this windswept island in Gardiners Bay that’s still closed to the public, but about allegations of homosexuality against a commanding officer, when Plum Island housed an army base in 1914. A few years ago Lindberg had been reading a history of Plum Island when she came across the hitherto unknown case of Major Benjamin Koehler, who had been arrested for Conduct Unbecoming An Officer and Gentleman, and court-martialed. She persuasively argues that the invisibility of this case says a lot about the power of the military to harass antagonists, wage an unjust legal campaign, and put a lid on history. But it’s the larger

Book Review: 'Scandal On Plum Island'

Yet another go at the Founding Fathers? Well, to judge from historian and documentary filmmaker Tom Shachtman’s new book, “The Founding Fortunes,” Yes and No. Subtitled “How the Wealthy Paid for and Profited from America’s Revolution,” Shachtman’s analysis of the years 1763-1813 merits a yes because he does revisit some of the big names and battles of the day. But the answer is also no because “The Founding Fortunes” is not just another look at Colonial and post-Colonial politics and economics. Shachtman has a timely and provocative take on who in America supported the War for Independence, and why. Relying on hundreds of historical documents and contemporary scholarship, Shachtman’s out to dispel what he calls “myths” about some of the movers and shakers of the day. And to suggest, by comparison, the less-than-generous or suspect ambitions of some of the wealthy today who would influence current events under the heading of patriotism. It’s a complicated and complex story Shachtman

Revealing The History Of Who Funded The American Revolution

Joan Baum is a recovering academic from the City University of New York, who spent 25 years teaching literature and writing. She has a long career as a critic and reviewer, covering all areas of cultural history but particularly enjoys books at the nexus of the humanities and the sciences. With an eye on reviewing fiction and nonfiction that has regional resonance for Connecticut or Long Island, Joan considers the timeliness and significance of recently published work: what these books have to say to a broad group of readers today and how they say it in a distinctive or unique manner, taking into account style and structure as well as subject matter.

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