Friday, March 15, 2013
“Poems 1962-2012” by Louise Glück; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (656 pages, $40) My mixed feelings about Louise Glück’s poetry may, in some eyes, make me unsuited to write a useful review of this book. It’s a very important …
Friday, March 15, 2013
If anybody was in dire need of a good PR rep, it was Mary Mallon. She was an Irish immigrant who worked as a cook for affluent New York families in the early 1900s and the first person identified in America as an “asymptomatic” typhoid carrier. After Mallon …
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Dan Slater boasts a relatively rare — for now — perspective on computer dating. Without it, he wouldn’t exist. Slater’s parents met through Contact Inc., a matchmaking service that debuted in 1965 and went defunct soon after — though not before the two college students paid $4 each …
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Los Angeles — The staircase is narrow and creaky, with a bookshelf made from a 100-year-old harp case teetering on the precipice of collapse at the top of the landing. Overflowing with open books, pages wildly askew and …
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Author Mindy Friddle describes dogs as “the ultimate yes men.” Padgett Powell agrees: “A dog is the only friend you can have in life,” he writes, “who will go with you wherever you want to go, whenever you want to go, without question and without putting on his …
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Charlotte, N.C. — Keith Bellows, 61, has gone more miles than most of us. The editor of National Geographic Traveler magazine was born in Africa — Leopoldville, in what was then Belgian Congo — partly raised in Canada …
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Craig Taylor, 36, is a Canadian-born writer who has lived in London since 2000. He is the author of Londoners — now out in paperback. It’s a collection of 80-some first-person essays that collectively form a portrait of …
Friday, March 1, 2013
That remote part of Maine “more east than north of Bangor” where Newbury, Vt., poet Sydney Lea spent time as a young man was populated by a rare breed of stouthearted men and women who made a hardscrabble …
Friday, March 1, 2013
“The Storyteller” by Jodi Picoult; Emily Bestler Books/Atria ($28.99) Sage Singer, the protagonist of Etna novelist Jodi Picoult’s ambitious 20th book, The Storyteller, is a physically and emotionally scarred young woman working as a baker in a small New Hampshire town. She avoids human contact, interacting only with …
Friday, March 1, 2013
“The Soundtrack of My Life,” by Clive Davis with Anthony DeCurtis, Simon & Schuster (608 pages, $30) He may be one of the most influential music executives in the world, but Clive Davis was never a music geek. He didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll as a teen, doesn’t …