Knuckleheads knocked me out. It’s full of finely observed stories with tremendously assured first-person voices. Many of these stories share common elements: characters in or looking back on high school sports careers, on one side of the bully/bullied equation, with a heightened (even ambivalent) sense of body consciousness — the collection is well-titled. But the [...]
Entries Tagged as 'k-author'
Jeff Kass: Knuckleheads
07 Dec 2011 · No Comments
Tags: k-author · k-title · short stories
Michael Kaminski: The Secret History of Star Wars
30 Jun 2010 · No Comments
The foremost thing I want to note about The Secret History of Star Wars is that I found fascinating nuggets throughout the whole book. Next, that it represents a hell of a lot of work on Kaminski’s part — it weighs in at over 600 pages. Third, that it would benefit greatly from a strong [...]
Tags: criticism · history · k-author · s-title
Julie Klausner: I Don’t Care About Your Band
10 Apr 2010 · 1 Comment
I had to read this book because of Klausner’s back-cover crack about “guys in their thirties who’ve never been married, ride their bikes to work, and really like Death Cab for Cutie,”* since that acurately described me when my fiancée and I started dating. (I’ve since given up on my thirties and on DCfC (I [...]
Tags: autobiography · i-title · k-author
Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven
19 Feb 2010 · No Comments
Krakauer’s creepy, gripping book uses a brutal double murder committed by Mormon fundamentalists as a vehicle for exploring the convoluted history of Mormonism, with a special emphasis on the Mormon church’s ambivalent relationship over time with polygamy and with direct personal revelation. (I never knew, for instance, that although Joseph Smith practiced polygamy himself, he [...]
Tags: history · k-author · u-title
Ben Karlin (ed.): Things I Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me
25 Jan 2009 · No Comments
Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me has an impressive list of contributors with ties to institutions that I think are almost objectively funny and trenchant: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, Mr. Show, The Onion, even McSweeney’s. It even includes a pair of essays by guys in bands I almost like.
So I feel [...]
Tags: k-author · nonfiction · t-title
Mark Kurlansky: Salt – A World History
27 Feb 2008 · 1 Comment
Several people asked me what I was reading while my answer included “a book about the history of salt.” To my bemusement, this answer was usually greeted with a drawn-out, “oh-kaaay” that seemed to ask, “Why would you want to read that?” if not “Why would anyone want to write that?”
The reaction puzzled me. Before [...]