Category: Nonfiction

Smart and well-researched and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes scattered: why is it that we get a detailed description of how letterpress printing works in the prologue, but don’t learn the names of the tools engravers use until page 238? Still, I was happily engrossed in the story of Bewick and his world: the streets and…

As an introduction to the test format, this book is OK, but it could be much better-edited: there are some errors, both in the text and in the practice tests. Example: on one practice test, the book says that the solutions of -x2 = 2x-15 are x=-3, 5 because in solving the problem, the author…

This is the third book from the American Lives Series that I’ve read: I might be on something of a literary nonfiction kick lately, memoir especially, the stories people tell about themselves and how those stories get told. This one is about the summer Skoyles was 16, 1965: living in Queens, learning Manhattan. It’s about…

I was more interested in the “wilderness” part of the story than in the “parenthood” part, but of course they’re intertwined. Johnson writes about moving from Michigan out to Idaho, where his grandparents have a ranch, and where he and his wife, Amy, will finish a cabin they’ve been building up on a hilltop: no…

I first read about What Becomes You in a post on the University of Nebraska Press blog back in April, and was pleased to find that the Brooklyn Public Library had ordered a copy. It’s a smart, well-written book, a memoir in two parts: the first part by Aaron, born Sarah, and the second by…

Frazier’s observations of New York are detailed and rich: the long essay on Canal Street (the candy-factory-turned-loft that Frazier lived in, the army-navy surplus store his landlord ran, the sounds of car horns and the colors of the sunset) is especially excellent, as are the essays about Queens and Brooklyn. Part of what I like…

In this pleasingly broad book, Nicolson delves into the geological, natural, and social history of the Shiant Isles, 600 acres of rock and sheep-grazing grass in the Outer Hebrides that Nicolson inherited from his father, who purchased them after his mother (Vita Sackville-West) noticed an ad for them in the newspaper. The Shiants are not…

I’ve been reading this book on the train and finding myself getting a little teary from the tenderness and sweetness and sadness of it, how Mark Doty articulates sorrow and hope and the joy a dog is/has/brings to people. As usual, Doty’s writing is detailed, vivid: he conjures such clear images of his beloved retrievers,…

Not as vivid as James’s fiction, but still enjoyable: pleasingly sinuous sentences, and impressions of light, of color, of landscape—ilex and cypress, canals and frescoes and dimly-lighted churches, the slower pace of travel in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

This book is, as the subtitle says, “A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings”—but, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap. Rorem writes about music in his diary, and bits of those thoughts about music (and the state of it in America today) end up in his speeches, letters-to-the-editor, and program notes for his own pieces.…