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Monday, May 5,2008
Lavinia (Harcourt), by Ursula K. Le Guin
Book Review
Lavinia, a princess in Virgil’s The Aeneid, was merely a walk-on character in the historical epic. She is transformed into the reluctant protagonist of her own story in Ursula Le Guin’s novel. An acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy, Le Guin turns to the past for an imaginative reconstruction of Italy in the days . . .
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Monday, May 5,2008
Humor and Pathos
Book Preview
For a writer, relating the immigrant experience without patronizing or perplexing the reader is no small feat. Actually making them laugh in the process is even harder. Firoozeh Dumas has been hailed by critics for being capable of delivering poignant glimpses of her experiences as an Iranian American growing up in Southern California with both sensitivity and humor.
Her first book to gain wide critical acclaim, Funny in Farsi, was a series of autobiographical essays illuminating her and her family’s experience of acclimatizing themselves to American culture. Her second, released this month . . .
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Wednesday, April 30,2008
Ardent Youth
Book Preview
It’s no coincidence that some of the most controversial and widely discussed books of the last century have been coming-of-age novels. Evidently there’s something about a young person’s path through the minefield of adolescence that can capture the anxieties of an epoch.
Milwaukee native Paul McComas’ new novel, Planet of the Dates, offers readers a glimpse into the shifting political and cultural climate of the late-1970s and ’80s through the eyes of an ardent youth. It speaks of an era when the public’s anxiety . . .
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Monday, April 28,2008
Deep in the Delta Mud
Missing out on the blues
Just 11 pages into In Search of the Blues (Basic Books), author Marybeth Hamilton comes right out and attempts to shatter accepted visions of Mississippi Delta blues purity. She desperately wants to play the iconoclast. “In fact,” she begins, “the Delta blues was not born in the bars and dance halls of Mississippi. That Robert Johnson and Charley Patton came to dominate blues history owes more to elusive mediators and shapers of taste.
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Monday, April 28,2008
Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Ben Ratliff
John Coltrane took jazz as far as it ever reached before his death in 1967. He remains a touchstone for young musicians and the subject of many books. The latest, by New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff, is true to its name. The Story of a Sound isn’t a compendium of anecdotes about the saxophonist’s life, but a thoughtful . . .
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Monday, April 21,2008
Mystery Woman
Local author cracks the case
Elizabeth Hewitt awakens with a strange sensation at the start of the novel Separated at Death (Berkley Prime Crime). What she feels is the close and unfamiliar banding of an engagement ring snug around her finger. She pauses to consider: Settling down with one man had never been tops on her to-do list. Hewitt isn’t the star of a romance novel, however, and the homicide detective/protagonist in the third Elizabeth Hewitt murder-mystery thriller is about to be thrust into more than marriage. Her Milwaukee author, Sheldon Rusch, has spun a web of dangerous marital discord involving unhappy couples, relationship counselors and murder victims decoupled from their heads.
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Sunday, April 20,2008
A Student’s Guide to Music History (ISI), by R.J. Stove
Book Review
A Student’s Guide to Music History might make a good textbook. It’s inexpensive and handy enough to slip into the pocket of a parka. It’s also entertainingly opinionated, even when the opinions are goofy. Many of us will take exception to a certain slant in the Australian writer’s perspective: He seems to put the NEA under the same heading as Axis cultural agencies. Paleo-conservative politics aside, Stove is a witty writer and . . .
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Sunday, April 20,2008
Nature and Youth
Book Preview
The unmitigated awe that nature can inspire in the youthful imagination has been a subject of reflection for countless poets and authors. Transcendentalists like Walt Whitman ascribed an almost pious relevance to a child’s discovery of nature.
It’s this sense of awe and wonder that writer Richard Louv believes is at stake in today’s youth, resulting largely from a dwindling contact with nature and an immersion in electronic media and structured play. In 2005 he published Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, enumerating the many ills that arise when children are gradually divorced from the natural world.
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Thursday, April 17,2008
Songs of the Earth
Book Preview
In spring 1988, Milwaukee’s observance of Earth Day was bolstered by the city’s first ever Earth Poets Celebration. A group of 10 ardent and inspired poets, handpicked by author and UW-Milwaukee instructor Jeff Poniewaz, assembled at The Coffee House on 19th Street to perform poetry that centered on environmental concerns. Twenty years later, they’re still going strong. Each annual event boasts a talented lineup of local poets that includes four of the original group members: Poniewaz, Harvey Taylor, Suzanne Rosenblatt and Louisa Loveridge-Gallas.
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Monday, April 14,2008
Turning History on Its Head
African Americans’ active role in 20th-century migration
The 20th-century history of African-American migration to the urban North is often told as a tale of declension. Leaving the repressive South, blacks soon found that life was little better in Northern cities, where discrimination, bitter poverty and unmitigated segregation continued to inform the African-American experience. Acts of resistance are often noted in this narrative, and attention is paid to the legal and political gains that African-Americans made in the face of such severe oppression, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet the story almost always ends with African Americans falling victim to the city, the field of play for the modern condition. Deindustrialization, white flight and the rise of the black “underclass” all serve to underscore the high price that modernity has exacted on the black community. Within this narrative, African . . .
Read more...Elections 2008
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Sources: Pentagon to stop forced tour extension
(AP)
AP - The Army will substantially reduce use of the unpopular practice of holding troops beyond their enlistment dates and will pay $500 to those still forced to stay in the service, defense and congressional officials said Wednesday.
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Analysis: White House, Dems backpedaling on AIG
(AP)
AP - For the first time since last fall's election, Democrats and the Obama administration are backpedaling furiously on an issue easily understood by financially strapped taxpayers: $165 million in bonuses paid out at bailed-out AIG.
Pence: Return AIG donations
(Politico)
Politico - House Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence is urging politicians from both parties to strongly consider returning campaign contributions from AIG.
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Top Stories
AIG head shares US anger of bonuses but backs them
(AP)
AP - The chief executive officer of failed insurance conglomerate AIG acknowledged Wednesday that the company's multimillion-dollar bonuses were "distasteful" to many and had provoked a firestorm of wrath. "I share that anger," Edward Liddy, chairman and CEO of the American International Group Inc., said in testimony prepared for Congress.
Obama seeks greater rein on financial institutions
(AP)
AP - President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to pass legislation giving the government greater regulatory authority over financial institutions like American International Group.
Consumer prices rise by largest amount in 7 months
(AP)
AP - Consumer prices rose in February by the largest amount in seven months as gasoline prices surged again and clothing costs jumped the most in nearly two decades.
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