After remaining stable for generations, Americans’ body weight suddenly began to spiral upward in recent decades. The average weight for women in their 20s soared from 128 pounds in 1960 to 157 pounds in 2000. Those numbers are included in The End of Overeating, David A. Kessler’s fascinating new book exploring the causes of weight gain along with strategies to take off … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: Ali shows deft plotting hand in ‘Kitchen,’ but overwrites like the Dickens
By Chauncey Mabe One of the knocks on modern literary fiction is that it seldom shows people at work, where, after all, most of us spend the preponderance of our time.And yet, as Monica Ali inadvertently demonstrates with In the Kitchen, it is possible to go too far in the opposite direction. Showing the tedium of a working life is one thing. Making it tedious for the reader is … [Read more...]
Ali shows deft plotting hand in ‘Kitchen,’ but overwrites like the Dickens
One of the knocks on modern literary fiction is that it seldom shows people at work, where, after all, most of us spend the preponderance of our time. And yet, as Monica Ali inadvertently demonstrates with In the Kitchen, it is possible to go too far in the opposite direction. Showing the tedium of a working life is one thing. Making it tedious for the reader is quite … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: ‘Angel’s Game’ a fresh, spellbinding take on genre novel
By Chauncey Mabe Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author of the international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, poses an affront to those serious readers who believe they know what makes for literary quality. What to do with a novelist, clearly motivated by a popular rather than artistic impulse, who nonetheless writes with wit, skill and creative energy?Zafon’s new novel, The Angel’s Game, … [Read more...]
‘Angel’s Game’ a fresh, spellbinding take on genre novel
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, author of the international bestseller The Shadow of the Wind, poses an affront to those serious readers who believe they know what makes for literary quality. What to do with a novelist, clearly motivated by a popular rather than artistic impulse, who nonetheless writes with wit, skill and creative energy? Zafon’s new novel, The Angel’s Game, is the … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: Miéville’s brave new novel remarkable, and a page-turner, too
By Chauncey MabeAdmirers of China Miéville’s brave new novel, The City and the City, are advised to take care lest they hurt themselves straining for comparisons to describe – to begin to describe – this amazing literary performance. Raymond Chandler meets Franz Kakfa? Philip K. Dick collides at a busy intersection with Georges Simenon? A mad scientist sews George Orwell’s head … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: Del Toro’s ‘Strain’ only a middling potboiler
By Chauncey MabeOne of the marvels of modern popular culture is the persistence of the vampire.You would think by now every conceivable variation on the undead, rising to drink the blood of the living, would have been dramatized to a point beyond cliché. And you would be right. Yet each year new vampire movies and novels sprout like mushrooms, many of them finding wide and … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: Cahill advocates passionately for Death Row ‘saint’
By Bill WilliamsDominique Green was 18 when Houston police arrested him in connection with a fatal shooting during a robbery. A jury that included no blacks convicted Green, an African-American, of capital murder. The court then sentenced him to death.Thomas Cahill, author of the best-seller How the Irish Saved Civilization, sees Green’s “monstrously unfair” trial as evidence … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper books: ‘The Rose Variations’ intrigues after slow start
By Aviva L. BrandtThe Rose Variations describes the journey of a “girl composer” from graduate school student to acclaimed artist with plenty of drama, from a gay tenure-seeking colleague who seduces her in an attempt to appear heterosexual to a stint on a lesbian commune boasting a bearded female cellist who has disappeared from the international music scene.This first novel … [Read more...]
ArtsPaper Books: ‘Departure Lounge’ the funniest of sad stories
By Aviva L. BrandtCanadian journalist Meg Federico woke up one day to find herself a member of the sandwich generation, torn between caring for her own young children in Nova Scotia and her elderly mother, who was descending into dementia in New Jersey.In her memoir, Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, Federico writes compellingly of the tug-of-war … [Read more...]