wahistorian's Reviews (506)

An excellent follow-on to Ana Maria Spagna's 'Reclaimers,' although Lippard's book focuses on how artists attempt to make sense of land use in the American West, and how they document and publicize human outrages against the land. Every page includes a photograph by an artist or of an artist's work in the West. Like Spagna, Lippard spends a lot of time exploring the greedy actions and inadvertent mistakes that have scarred western landscapes, but Lippard's call to action is for artists. "Where devastated landscapes provide fodder for photographic advocacy and raw materials for land art, the next hopeful step--in tandem with progressive land use politics--is a focus on actual recycling, reclamation, or remediation," she writes. "There are hundreds of exhausted sites littering the national landscape, waiting to be made meaningful: unsightly, dangerous quarries and mines, clearcut forests, slag heaps, mine shafts, trampled riparian areas, piles of hazardous waste leaking into our vulnerable waterways, and overgrazed pastures" (176-177). Though she acknowledges that so many of us live in the virtual world, she optiomistically depends on the fact that we reside in the local and the geographical world, and that we'll feel compelled to take care of it, all historical evidence to the contrary.

I had never heard of this Shirley Jackson book, but happened to see it in the bookstore. Coming-of-age novels are ordinarily my least favorite sort of novel, but Jackson's powers of observation and expression make this as much an examination of consciousness as a growing-up story. The book opens on Natalie Waite's last summer at home before starting college. Her bohemian father dominates the family and their special relationship makes breaking free complicated for Natalie. A shocking incident on the eve of her departure subtly informs the rest of the nvovel, as she moves into the dorm and desperately tries to establish herself among the on-campus cliques. We spend enough time inside Natalie's mind, exploring the meaning of her "self" in relation to that of others, that we assume we know her as well or better than she knows herself, but a twist in the final section makes the reader question, with Natalie, how we know what we know about others. I won't forget this one for a long time.

This book is a bit of a grab-bag at this point, having been compiled from past 'New Yorker' pieces and then updated again more recently. Kolbert's dispassionate tone and comprehensive reporting create a snapshot of a rolling disaster; someday it will be yet one more piece of evidence that we have been willfully blind and irresponsible with our planet. She interviews people who've identified the problems and people who've identified solutions, but the real question is, how to get people moving forward together, without ideology, toward saving ourselves from catastrophe?

Such a fun holiday read! These four stories are cozies with a twist. P. D. James is a master of the genre, juggling character, setting, and plot in the few spare pages of each story; every word counts. Well worth a read to see how she accomplished what she did!

I have to say that John Edgar Wideman's writing style is not for me. The premise of the books is fascinating: did Emmett Till's father--who was courtmartialed and executed for a rape-murder while serving in Europe in WWII--bequeath some sort of legacy that his son was destined to play out? But Wideman admits early on there is nearly no historical evidence about Louis Till's life, so he pursues an imaginative retelling of a hidden life.