It’s no surprise why Sharyn McCrumb is a bestselling author. In THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, she accomplishes a feat most writers wouldn’t be able to pull off. She creates a large cast of fascinating characters, differentiates them significantly from each other, tells their own individual stories in relatively few words, and combines them all into a solid overarching story. It’s a character study within a mystery.
This book is the eighth in McCrumb’s “Ballad” series, set in the Appalachian mountains of Wise County, Va. A young woman has apparently killed her father in a fit of rage. For some reason, the case gets a bit of national attention, and so a few big-city journalists are traveling to the area to report on it.
[click to continue…]
It’s with both great sadness and a sigh of relief that BLACK JACK: VOLUME 17 arrives — sadness, because this marks the end of Vertical Inc.’s trade-paperback reprints of Osamu Tezuka’s “peerless medical drama” manga; relief, because the publisher actually saw it through to the very end, as promised. I guess that meant the thing continued to sell.
If so, I’m not the least bit surprised. From the start, Tezuka’s series — first serialized from 1973 to 1983 — was a work of creative excellence, and stayed that way, through all these thousands of pages. If you’re looking to make an investment in a series that will pay off more than what you put into it, look no further.
[click to continue…]
Rebecca T. Alpert’s OUT OF LEFT FIELD: JEWS AND BLACK BASEBALL is a gem of a history book: a concise, fascinating account of a significant American cultural element, black baseball, and an exploration of one particular aspect of that element, the interactions and attitudes — both real and perceived — between Jews, blacks, black Jews and their audiences, and what it meant to identify oneself along those lines in the mid-20th-century United States.
At first glance, you might think it’s one of those dreary academic tomes that sprout from moribund Gender Studies departments, complete with confusing jargon and tremendous amounts of moral outrage. But Alpert is better than this. She doesn’t try to be encyclopedic about the numerous black baseball leagues.
[click to continue…]
“Who is Todd Grimson?” That was the first thought I had when someone recommended his work to me.
Apparently, he’s an author of quirky subject matters who burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s, and then faded just as quickly. Although from what I’ve read about him, he never stopped writing; he simply wrote under a different name. Now, Grimson is back with his older work — STAINLESS and BRAND NEW CHERRY FLAVOR — reissued by Schaffner Press, and a new novel on the horizon.
[click to continue…]
Not one who could afford a subscription to THE NEW YORKER, I had read Pauline Kael’s movie reviews in sparse instances over the years. In other words, my exposure to her — this was pre-Internet, mind you — was limited compared to other film critics.
It need not matter when presented with PAULINE KAEL: A LIFE IN THE DARK, Brian Kellow’s biography of the woman, who passed away in 2001. The author does his job in letting readers know why she was important. He also does his job in not deifying her, allowing her own words and actions to stand for themselves — sometimes, that doesn’t show her in the best light, but she had only herself to blame.
[click to continue…]
