reviews

Sensory Sorcery Author: Kate Wyer When I was a kid on my grandmother’s farm, she and I would each carry galvanized tin buckets into an endless passageway of raspberries. The sensory input, as one might imagine, was plentiful. There was flavor and sun and sharpness and memory and dirt and love and usually a feral cat or two. Reading Black Krim, by Kate Wyer, was like climbing back into those rows of berries. Through rhythmic first-person narratives, Wyer alternates between three characters with varying degrees of weight to one another. Something I hadn’t seen before, which was highly useful, was [...]

The Seventh Sense? Author:  Steven Pinker I’ve been putting words on paper for more than forty years.  You’d think I’d have figured it out by now.  But as Steven Pinker points out in The Sense of Style, there’s nothing particularly natural about writing.  While a toddler can learn to speak coherently without much effort, articulate writing takes many years of practice and a lot of hard work.  Even then, the results can be less than satisfactory.  Deftly untangling and explaining the numerous challenges faced by authors of various kinds, Pinker, a Harvard psychology and linguistics professor, has compiled a useful [...]

Cruel lessons... Author:  Andy Hall When you think of college kids in 1967, you might think of long haired hippies, Vietnam protests and psychedelic drugs.  But Joe Wilcox, a graduate student at Brigham Young University, had other plans that summer.  He dreamed of climbing Mt McKinley.  So he rounded up some like-minded individuals, scrounged together a lot of grub and gear, gassed up a squadron of rickety vehicles and headed north to Alaska.   Little did he know that he and his eleven newly-acquainted teammates were headed into one of the worst mountaineering disasters of all time.  Although he was only [...]