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Sunday Reviews in Brief

Written on: March 8th, 2010 by: in Blog Posts

We were extremely happy to see Pagan Kennedy’s review of Marilyn Johnson’s wonderful book on libraries and librarians- This Book is Overdue– in which yours truly and our fellow professional “guardians of all there is to know” struggle in daily battle against the loss of cultural memory, the physical decay of media, and the lure of the internet. It sounds like a superhero tale- and it is! We really think that everyone should read it at least once!

• Danielle Trussoni’s Angelology is “an elegantly ambitious archival thriller in which knowledge dwells in the secret underground places, labyrinthine libraries and overlooked artifacts that have been hallmarks of the genre.” You can read an excerpt from the supernatural thriller at this link.

• The Ask by Sam Lipsyte is “a witty paean to white-collar loserdom” set in the world of academic fundraising.
• The Infinities by John Banville is another retelling of the much-reworked Greek myth of Amphitryon which in Banville’s hands becomes a sumptuous novel of ideas.
• Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is “an entertaining and even moving” reworking of that “much loved but faded literary standby”, the English country village novel, in which the utterly stock characters of that genre enter a much updated version of their familiar haunts.
• Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen is a fast-paced biography- the author, Jimmy McDonough’s style is “akin to that of a true-crime story: fast, fun and flip” as he attempts to humanize (and perhaps tried too hard) the petty, vindictive, and untrustworthy subject- not crazy enough to be a fascinating train-wreck, not tragic enough to be easily forgivable. McDonough and Wynette both shine, however, when the emphasis of the work in the music and the voice, which remains “a stark contrast to the deadening, Disneyfied Botox passing for Nashville music now.”