Month: February 2024

“When people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir – here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop.”

Is this book a memoir? The title – The Anthropocene Reviewed and the subtitle Essays on a Human-Centered Planet — offer no clues. However, in the introduction, the author says that he wants to tell us stories about his life so that we can see how he has formed his … Read More

“In 1848 William and Ellen Craft, an enslaved couple in Georgia, embarked on a five-thousand-mile journey of mutual self-emancipation across the world.”

How does a writer create suspense when the outcome of the real-life story is already known? This book excels at keeping readers at the edge of their seats. How? Woo did a “staggering amount” of research to learn the sensory details of the way things felt, smelled, sounded, looked, and … Read More

“There are those who believe they know – and those who hope they may yet know.”

Seven pages into the preface of his huge collection of poems, Carl Sandburg  tells us that he will not pontificate on the art of poetry, which is what famous writers often do in that section. Instead, he says “A poet explains for us what for him is poetry by what … Read More