Word: readerly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sprinkled with anecdotal gems, this tangled history veers closer to "annotated picture book" than autobiography and crumples under the weight of too many half-baked attempts at introspection. The book's structure, it seems, was dictated not by laziness but by personal philosophy: he's not much of a reader. ("If there are no pictures in a book, forget it.") But he doesn't seem much for writing, either. Die-hard fans will be eager for the backstage access, but all others should take a pass - we've seen this song-and-dance before...
...rarely staying with one character for more than a few pages, Cappellani’s novel seems to combine a nuanced tribute to Shakespeare’s work with a page-turning plot worthy of Dan Brown. However, there are times when Cappellani’s style distracts the reader from the story. The novel often reads like a screenplay, with quick cuts between scenes that are described entirely in the present tense. Although Cappellani’s constant use of the present tense throws his reader into the midst of the action, it also restricts the scope of each...
...rehash the same stories or military clichés that generations of war movies have instilled in us. Instead, Komunyakaa turns to a smaller lens: the perspective of a particular character, or the different objects that constitute war. By boiling war down to its essence, Komunyakaa asks the reader, “Why do we go to war?”—and he does a pretty good job of answering his own question...
...sometimes veers toward a laundry list or a museum description. The second section of the book, which deals with the implements of war, sometimes loses its momentum due to the weight of the nouns that are loaded upon it. Komunyakaa excels at unemotionally describing scenes and letting the reader draw his own associations from the poetry. However, in poems like “The Clay Army,” he doesn’t add anything beyond the basic historical facts one could find in a textbook: “Some warriors are sculpted; in unbroken taijiquan stances...
...Democracy (Just Not The Way George Bush Did),” journalist James Traub’s pointed study of America’s attempts to promote democracy abroad and the damage those attempts have done to our image, could not have come at a better time.Traub takes the reader through the history of America’s foreign expansion, from our annexation of the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century through our current invasion of Iraq. This history serves as the basis for Traub to examine the current foreign policy of George W. Bush. The title...