The title story, for instance, balances wry commentary about housecleaning work (“never make friends with cats”) and deadpan observation (“I clean their coke mirror with Windex”) with a sad, thrumming back story. One suspects she might have had a higher profile had her subject matter been less gloomy: she mined her history of alcoholism in stories like “Her First Detox” and “Unmanageable,” which detail the turmoil of the DTs and lost potential, and her work in hospitals in stories like “Emergency Room Notebook, 1977,” which establishes a milieu of “rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools.” Yet the prevailing sensibility of this book, collecting 43 of the 76 stories Berlin published, is cleareyed and even comic in the face of life hitting the skids. A posthumous collection of stories, almost uniformly narrated by hard-living women, that makes a case for the author as a major talent.įrom the 1960s through the '80s, Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) published brilliant stories for low-profile publications-her six collections all appeared with reputable but small presses.
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And there is interesting information here. As a look at Jack Daniel's whisky, it's sort of misleading. Maybe when I'm older, this story will have more value.Īs a biography of Jack Daniel, this is sort of thin. And to me, false nostalgia feels worse than nothing. But the thing is our ancestors kind of sucked. Eric's ancestors and my ancestors crossing paths in his hometown at the Battle of Chickamauga, where I'll be running a marathon next year. It should have been neat to see this slice of history. Prior to the war, Forrest had been an ambitious slave the late 1850s, he was selling a thousand or more slaves a year, sometimes selling free blacks back into slavery, and earning about $100,000 annually.An imaginative risk-taker who was fearless as he charged into the enemy's ranks, Forrest embodied southern chivalry." Nathaniel Bedford Forest cut a dashing, romantic figure, with his high cheekbones and chiseled face, mustache and goatee, and hair swept back to expose narrow, intense eyes. But Blood & Whiskey's consistent pro-Confederate rhetoric had me feeling ill and bailing after 30 pages. I'm a stubborn reader and rarely bail on books. A short book about my husband's ancestor, the whiskey legend Jack Daniel. But her strongest lines trace the visual details that honor her father's profession. These early lessons persist: Macdonald’s language is mostly technical and restrained. Her father never questioned his daughter’s Victorian interests rather he taught her falconry terminology and patience on bird-watching expeditions. A young Macdonald could gaze at the wild birds at the zoo for hours, and begged for her parents’ permission to accompany local falconers on a hunting walk when she was 12 years old. Macdonald’s choice of coping strategy isn’t as random as it might seem: Habits of observation tied the author and her father, a photographer, close together. “One of the things that grief does is really shatter the idea of a narrative,” Macdonald told The Guardian in an interview, although her book is compelling evidence that grief can enable literary genres to transcend their structure. White, and Macdonald's family, and the prose is airtight, leaving little room for readers to transition between narratives. She intertwines chapters about birds of prey, a 1930s author named T.H. Macdonald’s book, the 2014 winner of both the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year Award, is an account of how the author recovers from the sudden loss of her father by adopting and training a goshawk. Congress enters the picture mainly in giving Washington the task of knitting together an army from among 13 querulous colonies. This is, first and foremost, a military history. Not only had no colonial uprising ever succeeded, but the Americans also were striking out against the world’s most powerful nation. The Hessians surrendered and the torch that had been lit in Philadelphia on July 4 continued to flicker.Īs award-winning author Rick Atkinson tells the story in “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777,” his cinematic first volume of three narrative histories planned on the American Revolution, the odds were stacked mightily against the rebels. 26, 1776 - when George Washington and his thin and ragged ranks shocked British-paid mercenaries in Trenton after crossing the icy Delaware River. July 4th is considered the nation’s birthday, the anniversary of the day in 1776 when the colonies told the world they had had enough of Great Britain and would take their own chances, thank you very much.īut the 4th would be largely forgotten today if not for another date a few months later - Dec. Now they’re happily married wives and mothers with successful careers–Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon. Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early twenties, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by Southern Living, Elite Daily, and Writer’s DigestĪ debut novel set against a background of hospital rounds and life-or-death decisions that pulses with humor and empathy and explores the heart’s capacity for forgiveness… All seven episodes of the first season introduce patients facing serious, debilitating health issues, from brain inflammation to frequent seizures to an inability to eat or drink without vomiting. That Sherlock Holmes element is one of the things that makes Diagnosis so compelling. I thought, Oh my God, this is not the multiplication tables. What I didn’t know was, there’s not one answer, but a dozen answers. “I thought diagnosis was like the multiplication tables,” Sanders says in the first episode, recalling her perspective on her profession as a young medical student. Lisa Sanders, the Yale University School of Medicine clinician who writes the aforementioned column, Diagnosis is also an emotional, nonfictional drama that highlights the complexities of medical science, the flaws in the American health-care system, and the promise of both modern medicine and technology’s capacity to connect patients with other people around the globe who recognize symptoms that may seem rarer than they actually are. Lisa Sanders, host of Diagnosis, with a patient.ĭiagnosis, the new Netflix docuseries based on the New York Times Magazine column of the same name, is, at its essence, a medical mystery show. There’s a sense of density built up in layers, but packaged inside a bland and featureless box this writing is like a nondescript cargo container (one of the book’s main images) filled with everything from expensive brand names, hi-tech geekery, and the detritus of popular culture to micro-perceptions of psychological shifts that take place just beneath the threshold of conscious attention.Īt times, the effect of this prose is one of deadpan absurdity, as when townhouses in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It’s overwrought, filled to bursting with similes and allusions yet somehow it still manages to feel as if it had been executed skeletally, entirely without flourishes. “The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.” William Gibson’s prose is cool and precise: minimal, low-affect, attuned to surfaces rather than depths. Some notes on William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country: And they’d like nothing more than to spend some time with you. And now, our cookbook will invite you to enter the heart of our cozy mystery worlds-the stories of our characters and of their authors, told through food.įor a short while, our protagonists have taken a break from crime solving to don aprons and wield spatulas and wooden spoons. This sense of warmth and companionship is what The Cozy Chicks try to invoke in our novels. The Cat, the Quilt and the Corpse by Sweeney Leann from. And the kitchen is the heart of the home. By the time we catch up on work and family and start discussing the last book we’ve read, the buttery, cinnamon scents of the apple ginger pie baking in the oven will curl around our shoulders like a warm shawl and coax a sigh of contentment from our lips.įriends, food, and fellowship. While the soup is simmering, feel free to sit back, relax, and listen to the sizzle of lemon chicken cutlets crisping to a golden brown in the frying pan. We’ll have a chat as a pot of tomato basil soup bubbles on the stove. Welcome to the Cozy Chicks kitchen! Pull up a stool and let us pour you a cup of coffee. Bartlett, Kate Collins, Maggie Sefton, Leann Sweeney, and Heather Webber/Blake The Cozy Chicks are seven mystery authors - Ellery Adams, Deb Baker (aka Hannah Reed), Lorraine/L.L.
It’s going to strike a lot of adult readers as an environmental tale, and that’s not wholly wrong. And while I adore his Journey trilogy, there is still no better example of this than the equally wordless The Tree and the River. Much like picture books of the past (like those created by Mark Alan Stamaty or, to certain extent, Anno) Becker’s titles invite the readers to take the deepest of deep dives into his books. Proving that picture books are for more than preschoolers, Becker’s challenge his readers. And from the start, Aaron Becker decided that that niche would be to go big or go home. An area where you excel above and beyond your fellow compatriots. How do you stand out from the crowd? It’s probably a good idea to have a niche. The sheer number of them coming out every month just boggles the mind. Never before have more people created more picture books for the American market. In the world of 21st century picture book creators, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Not a lot of picture books out there covering the rise and fall of whole civilizations either, but here we are. Not a lot of picture books out there on the subject. |