Book #179 of 2020: The Street by Ann Petry Upon reading this novel from 1946 I am stunned, both by the sheer raw power of the text and by the fact that I’d never even heard of it before seeing a friend’s rave review earlier this year. The title clearly had an impact at the …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: Jingo by Terry Pratchett
Book #178 of 2020: Jingo by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #21) This is a reasonably funny satire on the pointlessness of war, but as with many of Terry Pratchett’s books, there’s a certain degree of low-level racism and sexism underpinning some of the jokes. (Although the most overtly bigoted characters are generally positioned as fools, the …
TV Review: Shameless, season 8
TV #29 of 2020: Shameless, season 8 What a messy and under-written year of an already shaky program. Shameless has been growing into more and more of a soap opera as it ages, and part of that transition unfortunately involves pruning back the long history that makes these characters so resonant at their best. Sometimes …
Book Review: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D.
Book #177 of 2020: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D. An interesting yet not particularly surprising look at the Trump dynasty from the president’s estranged niece, detailing her grandfather’s emotional abuse of Donald and his other children and how that unloved arrogant …
Book Review: The Running Man by Richard Bachman
Book #176 of 2020: The Running Man by Richard Bachman I still love the propulsive adrenaline rush of this pseudonymous Stephen King dystopian piece, but I had forgotten just how needlessly steeped in bigotry it is. Presumably in an effort to make his protagonist more of a hard case, the author has him think and …
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Book Review: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko
Book #175 of 2020: Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (Metamorphosis #1) This Ukrainian novel offers a dark spin on the fantasy boarding school trope, more in the vein of The Magicians than Harry Potter. The pupils are essentially blackmailed into enrolling via threats to their family, the curriculum consists of memorizing arcane texts …
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Book Review: Empty by Susan Burton
[CW: Eating disorders. Cover removed due to concerns raised that it might be triggering itself.] Book #174 of 2020: Empty by Susan Burton Well-written but tough to face head-on, this is a fairly agonizing account of the author’s childhood and adult anorexia, bookending her arguably worse difficulty with binge-eating in high school and college. Susan …
Book Review: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu
Book #173 of 2020: The Kingdom of Back by Marie Lu Mozart’s older sister is one of those great lost tales from history, a fellow child prodigy who toured Europe with him and received widespread praise for her musical abilities. We even know from Wolfgang’s letters that she was a composer too, although none of …
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Book Review: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
Book #172 of 2020: Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi This book by Jason Reynolds attempts to condense Ibram X. Kendi’s excellent Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America into a more streamlined version for younger readers. (Both men are credited as authors, but …
TV Review: The Good Wife, season 4
TV #28 of 2020: The Good Wife, season 4 There’s a lot that I enjoy in this run of episodes, from the trustee played by Nathan Lane to Alicia’s growing disillusionment with her firm’s management style (which really pays off next year, but is fun to watch build up gradually for now). Since the initial …
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