by J. D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy is Vance’s memoir describing his uncommon escape from poverty in America’s Rust Belt to eventually graduate Yale Law School. The author takes us through his experiences to describe what he sees as drivers of poverty to help readers better understand why so many become trapped in the lower class,…
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by Arjun Basu Long-time readers will probably know how often I like to go out on a limb and suggest some fairly outlandish things––making presumptions about deeper meanings or even an author’s mentality when settling in on specific techniques used. While the discussions that result can sometimes feel not far off from taking a stab…
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by Khalil Gibran The Prophet is Gibran’s famous collection of poetic essays. Framed as a prophet preparing to leave a place he’s lived for over a decade, he imparts his final words of wisdom to the people he loves, those who have come to love him back, who listen in rapt attention. And these words…
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by Marius Kociejowski I made a mistake with this one––not a disastrous mistake, mind you, though it sure felt like it at first. You see, The Pigeon Wars of Damascus is Kociejowski’s follow up to his earlier work, The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool, a book which I have yet to read. I didn’t,…
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edited by Daniel Sinker We Owe You Nothing is a collection of select interviews from Punk Planet magazine from the late ’90s and early noughties. Most of the interviewees are musicians from punk bands, but also people from the ’biz side––people running record labels or distribution networks––as well as individuals and groups involved in politics…
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by Dave Grossman I honestly don’t remember where I first heard about On Killing, but it sure intrigued me at the time. Grossman’s book is about the conditioning employed by modern militaries in order to persuade reluctant soldiers into effectively killing, the emotional and psychiatric toll killing has on soldiers, and––I didn’t realize this, then––how…
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by Payam Akhavan Akhavan was an Iranian immigrant to Canada in the late ’70s, and part of the religious minority that was soon to face the brunt of the hate and violence to come from the radical Iranian government that took charge after the revolution. He became a successful lawyer within the International Criminal Court…
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by Carolina Maria de Jesus Child of the Dark is the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, who lived in a favela, a slum, of São Paulo in the late ’50s. (Well, longer than that in truth, but this is at least the period recounted within these pages.) With only a second-grade education, she sold…
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by Peter Wohlleben It’s amazing how seemingly little things can really ruin something. While I’ve spoken previously about how a synopsis with a poor focus can hurt a story before it even starts, the foreword written by Tim Flannery from The Hidden Life of Trees made me feel that it at least warrants a bit…
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