reviews

Love and loneliness... Author:  Leslie Jamison Leslie Jamison has made it.  Having published an acclaimed novel in 2010, at the age of 27, followed by a best-selling collection of essays and a riveting memoir, she is now teaching non-fiction writing at Columbia University.  It’s been an impressive run and it’s clear that she has yet to encounter a slump, as evidenced by her most recent work, Make it Scream, Make it Burn.  A collection of fourteen essays, it displays Jamison’s remarkable talent for deep introspection and vivid, gut-wrenching prose. The Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. Presenting [...]

A Past That Can't Stay Dead Author: Tana French Three books in to Tana French’s darkly elegant Dublin Murder Squad series and I am seriously hooked. There is a magic here, gritty and yet ephemeral at the same time. It’s something in the way French tells her stories, crafts her engagingly flawed characters, and follows the ebbtide of hope and despair that underpins even the most mundane of lives. Jaded detective Frank Mackey, head of the Undercover Squad and secondary character, read negative influencer in the previous book, The Likeness, gets his own starring role here. We follow Frank, known for his [...]

Prelude to freedom... Author:  Andrew Delbanco Courage beyond belief.  Conventional accounts give most of the credit to President Lincoln and the doggedly determined abolitionists in the North.  But historian Andrew Delbanco makes a convincing argument that it was brave runaway slaves that were really the driving force that finally brought an end to slavery in the United States.  Their repeated escapes to freedom in the North frequently generated news and clogged the courts, keeping the abolitionist fires burning.  By distressing the northerners, many of whom would have just gone on ignoring slavery’s existence,  and by enraging the southerners, who wanted [...]