Even during the height of Communism, Albania was an outlier, a dystopia seemingly little noticed by most of the world. Here was a country whose dictator, Enver Hoxha, broke ties with the Soviet Union because he believed criticizing and abandoning Stalinism was “revisionism.” Having then allied the country with Red China, Hoxha broke that off […]
|
||||
|
Book blurbs often seem the equivalent of movie blurbs. Skepticism seems justified when a publisher puts a blurb smack on the front cover just below the title — especially when it says, “May be the best book ever written about jazz.” Is this honest commentary or gratuitous puffery? With Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful: A Book […] It was an era more than half our population knows only through history. It was an era in which the United States went from being the only nation possessing nuclear weapons to facing the reality that the “Godless Commies” also had them. It was an era in which the Cold War blossomed, together with fear […] Do real private detectives read detective novels? Do police officers read crime fiction? I wonder because, as a practicing attorney, I don’t usually read novels dealing with lawyers. Even when written by attorneys, story-telling seems to require shortcuts. Perhaps unnoticed by the average reader, those shortcuts can leave me incredulous, even infuriated. Although David Schmahmann’s […] Sometimes a book leaves me puzzled. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s both. Paul Auster’s latest novel, Invisible, falls in the latter category. Before explaining why, the basic background of the story is necessary. Invisible is the memoir, of sorts, of Adam Walker’s life in 1967 as an undergrad at Columbia University. Told […] |
        |
|||
|
Copyright © 2024 A Progressive on the Prairie - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||