For The Book Obsessed
Should you read that book you’ve had your eye on? Will it totally rock or sink like a stone? Check out these book reviews from book lovers like you to help you find your next great read!
[ad_1] It would be remiss to read Lucille Clifton’s Generations: A Memoir, recently reissued by New York Review of Books, without considering the moment in which this book—Clifton’s sole memoir—was first released. Published in 1976, Generations emerged the year before the miniseries “Roots” aired on national television eight consecutive nights in a row, a year … Read more
[ad_1] A newer trend in diaspora writing, which has fast become one of my favorite sub-genres, is that of the disillusioned millennial surrounded by the legacy of prior generations. Beyond the usual response of confusion and determination, our protagonists are apathetic and often unlikeable. Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers, writes “They—the outside world—hardly know … Read more
[ad_1] Neal Stephenson’s new novel Termination Shock is an effective ecological thriller, which looks to foment meaningful change for humanity as we face the greatest threat to our existence since the unleashing of the atomic bomb. In his essay, ‘Innovation Starvation’ published in Project Hieroglyph, Stephenson posits that “Good SF supplies a plausible, fully thought-out … Read more
[ad_1] The world of You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is all apocalypse and debris, bare shambles coagulating into a familiar dystopian world order. The novel is marked as an “alternate history” of the early twentieth century, except that it doesn’t feel like one. The timelines are certainly murky, the laws are new, the … Read more
[ad_1] Welcome to another installment of a collaboration between the Chicago Review of Books and the Your Favorite Book podcast. Malavika Praseed, frequent CHIRB contributor and podcast host, seeks to talk to readers and writers about the books that light a fire inside them. What’s your favorite book and why? This week’s guest is Mina … Read more
[ad_1] Vanessa Jimenez Gabb’s second full-length collection of poetry, Basic Needs, is a love letter in three movements, written as the Brooklyn poet watches capitalist America in slow and seeping collapse with a steady, unflinching eye. The collection is not an elegy for this moment in time, but rather an homage to the lives built … Read more
[ad_1] Cathy Curtis’s subject in A Splendid Intelligence: the Life of Elizabeth Hardwick is mighty. A writer whose career spanned decades—a ‘literary lion’. It is a chronological account of the writer’s life. The first couple of chapters trace Hardwick’s origins. It draws a portrait of a young Elizabeth whose “bookish tastes made her an anomaly … Read more
[ad_1] The range of graphic novels and nonfiction for children gets better, more exciting and more popular with each passing year. Even the choosiest young reader won’t be able to resist the charms of these wonderful books. Marshmallow & Jordan For the reader who carefully arranges their stuffed animals at the head of their bed … Read more
[ad_1] The Chicago literary tradition was built by the foot. Where Los Angeles had the glamour and New York had the grandeur, some of the most influential writers made Chicago come alive on the page through the most intimate depictions of the most intimate of landmarks, from a street in Bronzeville to a house on … Read more
[ad_1] The artist Winfred Rembert accomplished unbelievable things in his seventy-five years, and he was the first to admit how unbelievable they seemed. But he wants you to know what drove him from picking cotton at age nine to being a local basketball star to surviving a lynching, working chain gangs, and gaining renown as … Read more