reviews

Is the truth truer than fiction? Authors:  John D'Agata & Jim Fingal What the heck is “nonfiction” supposed to be anyway?  What a lousy term.  Do purveyors of this genre claim to have some unerring route to the truth that they present to the reader?  We may all agree that fiction doesn’t have any rules.  But if that’s the case, what rules govern nonfiction?  If you think about it there really aren’t any and I’ve never seen that argument more vividly displayed than in The Lifespan of a Fact.  It’s a convoluted often rather ill spirited quarrel between two otherwise [...]

An ax of infamy... Author:  Sarah Schmidt It was one of the most notorious American crimes of the 19th century.  If you’re old enough you may remember a tasteless jump-rope rhyme that might make you wonder if you were raised by savages. Lizzie Borden took and ax and gave her mother forty whacks.  When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. Needless to say, there’s a lot more to the story and in See What I Have Done – her first novel – Sarah Schmidt has created a thoroughly riveting and eerily compelling account of this [...]

Rocks and race... Where did your ancestors come from?  Living in a country of immigrants (both forced and consensual), it’s a pretty common question in the USA.   What if you don’t know?  What if your ancestry is shrouded in a mist of slavery and expropriation?  As everyone knows, history is written by those in power and if your ancestors came to America in chains or were driven off their ancient homelands by the US Army, much of your family history has been whitewashed, appropriated or simply buried.  Driven by a tireless existential need, geologist Lauret Savoy, a woman of mixed [...]