I’ve written a number of book reviews and conducted author interviews for my site, Bostonist.com, as well as several others. I most enjoy contemporary literary fiction or Here are the opening paragraphs from a few of these literary-minded pieces.

James McBride, Song Yet Sung.

In an interview with Time magazine following her 1988 Pulitzer Prize win, Toni Morrison described thinking of Beloved as “the least read of all the books I’d written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember–it’s national amnesia.” Politicians’ recent sweeping claims about family members marching “together” with Martin Luther King, Jr. (without actually being in the same city), as well as suggestions that civil rights legislation is more the purview of legislators than activists, bring that sort of national amnesia to the forefront. Have we truly forgotten about our slave-based past and once-institutionalized racism—and, if so, what does that mean for our future? James McBride definitely doesn’t suffer from our national amnesia. Rather, he’s working hard to combat it in his latest novel, Song Yet Sung. [
full review]

Josh Kendall, The Man Who Made Lists

Do u luv txtspk? Do u IDK ur BFF Jill? (Don’t worry, we know nobody does that, except in commercials.) R u totes 4gtg rl wrds? Joshua Kendall wants to help. His thoughtful new biography of Peter Mark Roget, the man who wrote Roget’s thesaurus (in longhand, at that), reveals the importance of not only word choice but also the relationships between words. Kendall, who’s currently working on a biography of Noah Webster (the guy behind the dictionary), thinks that the “printed word is under assault” in our culture, and feels a calling to write about “crazy lexicographers” in an effort to raise our awareness of language. [full review]

Lewis Black, Me of Little Faith

Black’s first book, Nothing’s Sacred, was an autobiography. While rooted in Black’s own religious experiences, Me of Little Faith also makes use of broader themes. Right at the beginning of the book, Black makes an astute observation on a topic that’s always bugged this Bostonist. After delineating his infant confusion at entering the world and interacting with adults, he concludes “it turned out that the existence of God is something that I’d have to learn.” And learn he did—to hilarious results. [full review]

Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Gary Marcus is smart. He understands the workings of the human brain, including evolutionary mechanisms that make us “the only species smart enough to systematically plan for the future—yet dumb enough to ditch our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification.” His new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind reveals how evolution has worked both for and against us when it comes to making smart—as opposed to instinctual—decisions. [full review]

George Lakoff, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain

Lakoff divides schools of thought into conservative and progressive in part to avoid making distinctions across party lines, but also to emphasize that you can have both conservative and progressive frames of mind. You can think conservatively on one issue and progressively on another. What’s not rational is taking a conservative standpoint on an economic issue—like, say, taxes—based on conservative social values. The problem is that conservatives have convinced Americans to think in a consistent conservative framework. Recognizing that it is sometimes, even often, rational to hold different types of positions on different issues is one of the first steps in breaking the overarching conservative frame that shapes our nation’s current political outlook. [read more]

Andre Dubus III, The Garden of Last Days.

The Garden of Last Days came to Andre Dubus III in piecemeal visions: a wad of cash here, an inspired title there. What he originally thought of as a short story grew to 700+ pages and over a dozen characters, which he cut down to a more manageable 500-page tome. Like its subject matter—choices that are difficult to understand—The Garden of Last Days is multilayered and complex. Chapters narrated by different characters give the reader a holistic perspective on the action. The plethora of voices is more compelling than confusing, and Dubus infuses the plot with enough urgency to create a quick, heart-racing read. [full review]

Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

As we all know, Boston is the hub of the universe, but it’s easy to forget the extent to which our fair city was once a hub of Puritanism. Sarah Vowell puts this component of Boston’s identity in the spotlight in The Wordy Shipmates, an in-depth exploration of the Puritans’ arrival and continuing influence in our country. As witty as we cleverly predicted last year, Shipmates is the story of our founders’ religion and how it has affected us to this day, right down to the “city upon a hill” rhetoric that politicians from Kennedy to Reagan to certain current presidential campaigners have adopted. [full review]

TC Boyle, The Women

TC Boyle’s new book, The Women, traces Frank Lloyd Wright’s life in an innovative way: through the story of his many wives and mistresses. The tale is told from the point of view of (imaginary) architectural apprentice Tadashi Sato, who’s editing the insertions of his granddaughter’s husband, Seamus O’Flaherty. It’s a complex construct, but the book still reads smoothly. Most interruptions come in the form of outbursts from Miriam, Wright’s morphine-addicted second wife, but Tadashi’s footnotes to O’Flaherty’s tale provide amusing anecdotes as well. [full review]

Michele Lamont,
How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment

How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment discusses the not-so-secret subjectivity of criteria among peer review committees. What Lamont found was not necessarily surprising, but sheds some light on the best way to get what you’re going after in academia. We talked with her briefly last week. [full interview]

Daniyal Mueennuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

“So, what are the wonders?” you might ask upon encountering Daniyal’s Mueennuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a Story Prize finalist (the prize winner will be revealed tonight, in NYC). Many interpretations of the title are possible: the stories themselves, the characters in them, valuable objects. But the predominant “wonder” derived from reading the story turns out to be a stark realization of the human thread connecting the reader and the characters, all of whom stem from diverse cultural backgrounds. And not just the wonder of that connection, but the wonder of our collective ability to continually forget it. [full review

Kelly O'Connor McNees, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott

In The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Kelly O'Connor McNees has crafted a gentle tale of a strong-willed woman who prioritized her own success over social pressures to marry and have a family. By setting up Alcott in the fictional situation of having a long-lost love, McNees ironically works in a similar framework to Alcott herself, who famously based Little Women on her own family: frail Lizzie, comely May, stalwart Anna, and her own headstrong self. McNees paints Alcott as stubborn but sensible, sewing pillowcases to make her way until her stories start to sell, and highly family-oriented but still unwilling to give up on her own dream. [full review]