Category: race
- Two MasterpiecesNickel Boys a film by RaMell Ross. With Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, Trey Perkins. Streaming on various platforms. ***** I felt about the movie Nickel Boys exactly the way I felt about the book; I wanted to see it but was half afraid to. There are many ways a movie could have ...Read more
- American OriginalRecollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years by Diane di Prima. Penguin Books. 424 pp. $18.00. **** In this astonishing and inspiring memoir—424 tightly packed pages full of remarkably detailed writing, which covers maybe 30 years of a hugely eventful life—there are several moments that stand out for me. One is when, ...Read more
- And Is He PissedValdez Is Coming a novel by Elmore Leonard. From Elmore Leonard: Westerns. Library of America. pp. 279-414. ***** I shouldn’t make too much of Elmore Leonard. I probably already have. He was a genre writer who didn’t care what genre he was in, switched from Westerns to Crime novels when the Western market fizzled out. He ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.The Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 388 pp. ***** It isn’t often that I read a novel, then sit down immediately and read it again. I wasn’t planning to do that this time. But as I pondered my previous review of The Known World, I saw structural things about the novel ...Read more
- Elmore the GreatLast Stand at Saber River and Hombre from Westerns by Elmore Leonard. Library of America. pp. 1-278. ***** I love the story of Elmore Leonard’s formation as a writer that Greg Sutter tells in his excellent chronology at the back of the Library of America volume. Born in 1925, Leonard grew up in Detroit and attended ...Read more
- Writing Like GodThe Known World a novel by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 388 pp. ***** I have a friend who, when he wants to compliment a writer’s style, says, He (or she) writes like a god. He’s said that a few too many times at this point, but I know what he means. He reads a number ...Read more
- Facing DeathHis Three Daughters a film by Azazel Jacobs. With Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, Elizabeth Olsen, Jovan Adepo, Jay O. Sanders. Streaming on Netflix. ***** His Three Daughters is a sleeper, a Netflix original that we watched because we were fishing around for something to watch on a Saturday night, and it had just been reviewed in ...Read more
- Roll Out the OldstersThelma a film by Josh Margolis. With June Squibb, Fred Hechinger, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Richard Roundtree. Streaming (for a fee) on Apple+. **** Thelma is an oldster movie, a genre I haven’t written about for some time but which has not gone away. It is a crime movie in which the person going after the ...Read more
- Plain TruthAll Aunt Hagar’s Children stories by Edward P. Jones. Harper Perennial. 399 pp. ***** Edward P. Jones, it would seem, can write about anything, and anybody. He published his first book of stories, Lost in the City, in 1992 (otherwise known as half-a-lifetime ago). It was a bit of a late arrival on the literary scene; ...Read more
- He Debuted as a MasterLost in the City stories by Edward P. Jones. Amisted. 243 pp. $15.99. ***** There was a time when I read book reviews the way, as a kid, I used to read the sports pages. At my house we got the Sunday New York Times and Saturday Review, also the New Yorker. It wasn’t as if ...Read more
- Let It RingTelephone a novel by Percival Everett. Graywolf Press. 216 pp. **** I had thought of Percival Everett as an offbeat comic novelist who sat down to write a novel with no idea where it was headed (see . I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Even Erasure, though a biting satire, had a comic premise, and the novel ...Read more
- The Other SideWhereas Huck Finn gives us an idyllic vision of life in 19th century America, James gives us the other side, in all its brutality. It’s a necessary and important corrective.Read more
- The River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseTwain, on the other hand, wrote a prose that seemed entirely American and utterly his own. It seemed to roll off his pen.Read more
- Book to MovieDirector Cord Johnson is a huge Percival Everett fan, and American Fiction seems perfectly to capture the spirit of Erasure. I was astounded.Read more
- Slippery SlopeCrook Manifesto a novel by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday. 319 pp. ***** There is the pleasure of reading a great crime writer, someone like Elmore Leonard at his best, who makes any other storyteller I know look like a rank amateur. There is the somewhat different pleasure of reading a great contemorary novelist, like Jonathan Franzen or ...Read more
- Two Gay MenGood Grief a film by Dan Levy. With Dan Levy, Ruth Nessa, Himesh Patel, Luke Evans. Streaming on Netflix ** Rustin a film by George C. Wolfe. With Colman Domingo, Ami Ameen, Glynn Turman, Chris Rock. Streaming on Netflix ***1/2 Good Grief tells the story of a man whose husband dies. Marc (Dan Levy) is living an ...Read more
- The Ones Left BehindThe Holdovers a film by Alexander Payne. With Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph. In theaters and streaming for an arm and leg on Amazon Prime. ***** Three more or less sane adults (though one is just eighteen), all of whom have strong points, weak points, deeply held secrets, but none of whom is the ...Read more
- ChampKing of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero by David Remnick. Vintage. 352 pp. $14.39. ***** Of all the subjects I would have thought I knew everything about, Muhammad Ali is right at the top of the list. I started following his career in 1960, when he won an Olympic Gold ...Read more
- The Spirit Behind the StoryThe Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to his White Mother by James McBride. Riverhead Books. 295 pp. ***** I was so overwhelmed by The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store that I decided to reread James McBride’s memoir of life with his mother, The Color of Water. I knew his own situation influenced the novel, ...Read more
- Utopian RealistThe Heaven & Earth Grocery Store a novel by James McBride. Riverhead Books. 385 pp. ***** James McBride has written award-winning and bestselling novels in the past—The Good Lord Bird and Deacon King Kong—also a highly acclaimed memoir, The Color of Water, but The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store—is a different kind of book altogether, beyond ...Read more
Recent Evening Mind Posts
Dogen for the MassesWeird From the Get GoTwo MasterpiecesMary, Erica, MirandaUntil the End
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (218)art (114)Buddhism (170)Christianity (125)creative process (249)death and dying (139)meditation (124)movies (161)music (36)race (106)religion (188)sex (172)spirituality (171)the art of narrative (255)Uncategorized (20)world literature (23)
Print
Dogen for the MassesWeird From the Get GoTwo MasterpiecesMary, Erica, MirandaUntil the End
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (218)art (114)Buddhism (170)Christianity (125)creative process (249)death and dying (139)meditation (124)movies (161)music (36)race (106)religion (188)sex (172)spirituality (171)the art of narrative (255)Uncategorized (20)world literature (23)