CarrieK | February 22, 2010
Title: At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays
Author: Anne Fadiman
Genre: Essays
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Source: Print copy from my personal library
First line: Just over half a century ago, in “A Gentle Dirge for the Familiar Essay,” a dispirited writer mourned the imminent death of a genre that was “setting to [...]
CarrieK | January 6, 2010
Title: Things That Make Us [Sic]
Author: Martha Brockenbrough
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Source: Review copy from the author
First line: It was the fall of 2004 when I founded the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar after writing a column about secret societies for the online encyclopedia Encarta.
Last month I had [...]
CarrieK | December 15, 2009
Title: The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment
Author: A.J. Jacobs
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Source: Print copy from my own library.
First line: Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions.
I thoroughly enjoyed Jacobs’ first two books, The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, and so when my [...]
CarrieK | September 4, 2009
Update: I’m editing the title to indicate that these are books I think everyone must read, not books I’m listing for myself to read. I’ve read – and loved – all of these, that’s why I consider them must-reads. )
I have officially run out of genres in which I can list my favorites. [...]
CarrieK | July 28, 2009
Visions of America addresses a single question: How do you photograph democracy? After all, democracy is an “idea,” and not something one can easily wrap one’s lens around. But photographing democracy is indeed what Joseph Sohm has done in this epic journey across the fifty states. To capture this country’s incredible diversity, Sohm framed his [...]