Hotly anticipated in 2020: The Believer’s Read Hard with a Vengeance.
Nineteen essays, often funny and sometimes poignant, from the journalists, essayists and novelists long admired by the editors at McSweeney’s Believer magazine.
Upon its launch, the founders of the magazine said, “We will focus on writers and books we like. We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt.” Soon after, a critic described the magazine as “highbrow but delightfully bizarre,” which fits the bill. This new collection of essays by the likes of Nick Hornby, Susan Straight, Lev Grossman and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah certainly strikes that unique and iconoclastic tone—McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers’ tastes and style are all over this collection, if not his name. Edited by founding editors Park (Personal Days, 2008) and Julavits (The Vanishers, 2012, etc.), the collection spans a wide range of literary criticism, celebrity profiles, journalistic nonfiction and humorous ephemera. It opens with “The Disappearance of Ford Beckman,” by Michael Paul Mason, a story that wouldn’t go amiss in Esquire, concerning an iconic American artist reduced to making donuts at Krispy Kreme. Closer to the end, novelist Leslie Jamison examines a bizarre, Tennessee-based endurance test called the Barkley Marathons. On the literary front, mystery novelists Sara Gran and Megan Abbott tackle the enduring legacy of V.C. Andrews, while journalist Zach Baron delves into the late Robert Jordan and the finishing of the Wheel of Time saga. It can be a jarring transition, following Jeannie Vanasco’s examination of erasure (the art form, not the band) in “Absent Things As If They Were Present,” with Rebecca Taylor’s “Virginia Mountain Scream Queen,” remembering a lowbrow history in B-movies, but it’s refreshing, too. It’s really best to jump around—only readers can best decide if they should start with “How to Scrutinize a Beaver” (on 18th-century anatomy) or “If He Hollers Let Him Go” (chasing the ghost of comedian Dave Chappelle).
Hotly anticipated in 2020: The Believer’s Read Hard with a Vengeance.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-940450-18-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Believer Books/McSweeney's
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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