Reviews

You know how I'm always complaining about stories told in multiple voices? (They should come with a warning on the cover!) Well this is another one. Maybe because they take turns so frequently in this book that you don't get attached, it isn't as much of a problem as usual. Still, maybe because I didn't get attached to any of the characters, it feels the whole time like you're waiting for the book to happen. The connecting stories are compelling enough, but what's really interesting is the look at life in Kuwait. I don't know much about the country, other than remembering learning how rich it is. In elementary school we didn't talk about how you can't be rich without having poor people take care of you. In Kuwait, all Kuwaitis (not including Kuwait-born Palestinians) are pretty well off, which means they have to import their servants and even many of their professionals. Most of the characters in the book are American, Filipino, Indian, or Palestinian, rather than Kuwaiti. It takes a lot of non-rich people to take care of the rich people, I guess.

This may shock some of y'all, but I don't always love zine books, that is zines issues collected or even somewhat repackaged. Exceptions include Zine: How I Spent Six Years of My Life in the Underground and Finally...Found Myself...I Think by Pagan Kennedy and Pete Jordan's Dishwasher. Zines are meant to be read episodically; there needs to be some time between issues. I also don't think they all clean up well. They don't all belong in book form, all neatly bound and with consistent margins. I felt the same way about just about every show I worked on at the Public Theater that transferred to Broadway. The shows lost their intimacy in a large house with high ticket prices. Give me a $2 zine over a packaged anthology or a $10 black box play over a spectacular production with moving scenery every time!

I preface my review of Nicole Chaison's Passion to let you know where I'm coming from. I wanted to love it, but I didn't. I liked it, and I bet if I read the zine versions of her stories, I'd love them. One thing I really admire about the book, that I suspect isn't present in her zines is the illuminated manuscript approach, even though I found it confusing at first. Each page consists of minicomics illustrations on the side and text in the center. My problem was that I didn't know what to read first. I eventually found that it was better to read the text and then the art, but sometimes that meant the footnotes would be out of order. Yes, I said footnotes, an element that I found endearing.

I fell for Grammar Girl's podcasts, especially those that vindicate and explain my grammar (usage) pet peeves. One example is end punctuation and quotation marks. In America, they generally go on the inside, in case you were wondering. The "Why Are British English and American English Different?" episode explains it. Scroll down to "Typesetters Quotations Versus Logical Quotations." Like Fogarty, I think the American way is illogical, but it's how we do it here, and I get annoyed when I see people doing it wrong. Same with Anglophile spellings. So annoying!

Tween Black Panther lit! Three kids travel to Oakland for the summer to stay with their estranged and unmotherly mother. She sends them out every day to Black Panther breakfast and summer camp while she stays home and writes poems for the revolution. The story is told from the oldest girl's point-of-view. At 11, and motherless for most of her life, she takes care of her younger sisters and is fearful about hanging out with the Panthers. Still, she takes in their message, and it makes her stronger. Not that she wasn't plenty strong already. Delphine is a nuanced and believable character, as are her sisters. I loved the tidbits defining African-American kids lives in the 60s/70s, them counting black people on television and how many lines they had, encountering white hippies in the Haight and Teutonic tourists in Chinatown, and most of all their getting to see the BPP as an aid organization.

I'm a little afraid to proclaim how much I enjoyed this middle class white lady prison memoir for fear that my prison justice activist friends will tell me everything that's wrong with it. Regardless, Orange Is the New Black is a really good read. In Smith alumna Piper Kerman tells of her experiences doing time for a drug crime committed over ten years before her incarceration. It's not a woe is me (or woe is I) story. She fully cops to her crime and in fact prison does educate her on just how deleterious drug trafficking is when she understands her fellow inmates' addictions and plights. She isn't uncritical, though, of the "war on drugs."

I'd read DTWOF here and there, mostly on the interweb, like especially when the main character, Mo, decided to go to library school in 2001, and the link to that strip got forwarded around the bibliosphere like crazy. But without regular exposure, I had not realized just how brilliant the biweekly comic strip is. I can't believe (okay, I can believe but don't want to) that it isn't syndicated in every newspaper that carries Doonesbury, or at least Boondocks. I'm guessing it's the title? Which is unfortunate also because this comic is relevant to all people with radical left politics. Maybe even liberals!

I don't get it. Oftentimes when a book is a huge success there's an easily discernible reason. I'll admit The DaVinci Code was a real page turner, and Oprah nailed most of her book club selections back in the day. But The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just isn't all that. It's compelling, sure, but standard thriller fare. Possibly a little more interesting for its Swedishness, but really it's just another guy written guy book where a smart middle aged guy ends up a hero with the money and the girl half his age. He throws in some statistics about violence against women and some strong female characters, yet one of the rape scenes was just a little too rapey for my feminist taste.

I've read the book's prequel Rivington Street but hadn't revisited Union Square since I bought it in a used bookstore in Guatemala in 2001. RS is a historical novel, but US reads more like a fictional history. It's full of educational examinations of Jewish life in the 1920s-40s, covering issues like Palestine, Zionism, World War II, communism, and labor politics, but also tells the stories through the lenses of art, fashion, and psychiatry. Tax used oral histories for her research, and the voices sound authentic. To me the most interesting and informative bits are the characters internal and external struggles with the party line and the multi-faceted views on the conflicting Zionist movements. The author does a good job of revealing multiple truths in these contentious topics, but you still have an idea where she's at personally. The sometimes disastrous relationship between the Communist Party and American labor, not to mention the difficulties it creates between father and daughter is sometimes painful to read, but fascinating stuff!