I ran up against my ignorance when as an undergraduate student I enrolled in Philosophy 101, read a sentence in my first assignment, and said to myself, "I know the meaning of that word and that word and that word, but in this sentence, all three of those words are in a row, and I have no idea what they mean when they're in a row." After a bit, I realized that I didn't know what those three words really meant. I had the same realization when I read the words "age gracefully" in the title of Scoblic's book.
Lost Without the River: A Memoir by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic. Published by She Writes Press. Barbara Hoffbeck grew up during the Great Depression on a small dairy farm outside Big…
Current events sometimes justify reviewing a book published years ago, especially if the book helps readers better understand their world today. Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich is such a book.
Iraqi novelist and poet Sinan Antoon's The Baghdad Eucharist is an unforgettable novel of memory, loss, love and diaspora. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013.
Rico Stays is the final novel in Ed Duncan’s Pigeon-Blood Red trilogy. As he did in the other two books in the series, Pigeon-Blood Red and The Last Straw, Duncan…
In 2011, the Korean American writer and teacher Suki Kim taught English to the sons of North Korea’s elite. This book explores her experiences there and, as she writes, “My goal was to write a book that humanizes North Koreans.”
Native Country of the Heart was the right book at the right time. It read like a personal letter from Cherríe Moraga to me, and I will be forever grateful…
If you’ve ever built a sand castle in the intertidal zone at the ocean’s edge, you know what happens when the tide comes in: It washes away your castle, leaving not a trace of it except in your memory or a photograph.
When Jeffrey Phillips, a poor teenager in Chicago, shoots and kills a man in a carjacking gone sideways, Sandra Yanders, a teen witness from “the other side of the tracks,”…
Sycophancy (ˈsikəˌfan(t)sē) is the phenomenon known to most of us by alternative words or phrases such as sucking up, ass kissing, brown nosing, and bootlicking—words and terms that give sycophancy…