Bloomsbury 185 pp. $19.95
The Given Day
Dennis Lehane’s ambitious new novel evokes a dark chapter of US history.
Sumber : The Christian Science Monitor, By Carlo Wolff | September 29, 2008 edition
A war-fatigued nation confronts an overheated economy, a tangle of vengeful terrorist organizations, rising joblessness, and racial tension. It sure sounds contemporary but The Given Day, Dennis Lehane’s wildly ambitious new novel, is set in Boston toward the end of World War I.
Lehane is best known for “Mystic River” and “Gone, Baby, Gone,” Boston-based police thrillers that double as morality tales even as they peer into the hearts of dysfunctional families and build on complex layers of honor.
But this time, in his eighth novel, Lehane dips back into the past. It’s an enthralling journey and one that reaffirms the imagination and narrative vigor of Lehane.
“The Given Day” mixes fact and fiction in epic fashion by swirling such historical figures as Babe Ruth, Communist author John Reed, J. Edgar Hoover, and Calvin Coolidge in with fictional characters. The primary focus of the book is the failed Boston police strike of 1919. Baca entri selengkapnya »
The Heretic’s Daughter
A debut novel about the Salem witch trials draws on the author’s own ancestry.
Sumber : The Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo! Alerts, By Yvonne Zipp | 
October 2, 2008 edition
If you live in Salem, Mass., chances are good your ears are burning right now. Not since the heyday of Nathaniel Hawthorne (or possibly Stephen King) has the town attracted so much fictional attention.
First up was this summer’s bestselling debut “The Lace Reader,” which set a witch hunt in modern Salem. This fall features two debut novels set during the hysteria of 1692, when men and women were hanged on the say-so of little girls.
One of these, The Heretic’s Daughter, by Kathleen Kent, goes inside the home of one of the accused. Martha Carrier, if preacher Cotton Mather is to be believed, was the “Queen of Hell.” To her 9-year-old daughter, Sarah, she was a tough-minded farmer’s wife who didn’t suffer fools at all. And being an outspoken woman in 1690s Massachusetts could get you killed.
“Where there are women, there are witches,” her cousin Margaret tells Sarah. (A feminist slant is almost de rigueur for those wanting to write about the Salem witch trials.) Baca entri selengkapnya »
Why reading is not fundamental
A professor of literature extols the virtues of nonreading
Sumber : The Christian Monitor, By Marjorie Kehe | January 28, 2008 edition
I must admit that I hadn’t read more than a few sentences of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You
Haven’t Read before I found myself thinking, “There’s no way he really believes this.” After all, how likely is it that a French intellectual (psychoanalyst and professor of French literature at the Sorbonne) is going to publicly suggest that too much reading may not be good for you? And that there is a certain virtue to nonreading? And yet that’s exactly the way that Bayard begins his trim little treatise (which is, by the way, laced with references to literature).
And so I certainly felt wary as I inched into the preface. “We still live in a society, on the decline though it may be,” notes Bayard, “where reading remains the object of a kind of worship.” It is to break through this mind set, Bayard explains, that “throughout this book, I will insist on the risks of reading – so frequently underestimated – for anyone who intends to talk about books, and even more so for those who plan to review them.”
Okay, so he’s being clever, I figured. He’s French after all, and probably very comfortable with irony. And he has certainly read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in which the wily Mark Anthony announces, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” and then does quite the opposite.
But no, long before I reached the epilogue I realized that Bayard is quite serious. (And if he’s ever read “Julius Caesar” he’s certainly not going to brag about it.) Baca entri selengkapnya »
