by Maya Ombasic Mostarghia starts in the days surrounding the death of Ombasic’s father. Told that she can only recover his body from the hospital morgue if a religious authority prepares it for its final resting place, we bear witness to the callousness the author is met with when church after church after church refuses…
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by Marcus Aurelius Not long ago, I was reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors to Perception with the full intention of reviewing it, but I was struggling to come up with anything meaningful for discussion. I found the book to be extraordinary in many ways, even important enough to help me through some difficult times, but…
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by Harley Rustad In the midst of exploring Vancouver Island on the hunt for the oldest and largest trees, T. J. Watt, a photographer for an environmental organization, the Ancient Forest Alliance, stumbled upon a fresh clear-cut with an unusual feature: A solitary tree was left standing, and it happened to be one of the…
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by Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes is McCourt’s famous memoir describing his staggering poverty growing up in Ireland in the 1930s. While this may at first glance sound similar to something I recently reviewed, I assure you this is a different thing entirely, both with regard to style and focus. McCourt chronicles a life of severe…
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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 Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl is Frank’s personal diary kept during the two years spent in hiding in a small apartment in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. Upon hearing the Dutch government was seeking out personal accounts of the conflict for later publication, she wrote and rewrote many passages with the intention…
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates When I originally heard about David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, it immediately brought Between the World and Me to mind. Of course, I hadn’t actually read Coates’ book yet at the time, but I nonetheless wondered whether Chariandy’s essays directed at his young daughter about the history of racism…
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by Misha Glenny I’m a sucker for what I understand to be a sort of Slavic charisma. It’s probably not actually exclusive to the Slavs, but that’s where I can recall encountering a sort of joking, masculine joviality with a subtle undercurrent of cruelty or aggression. And I love it, for some reason––even when it’s…
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by David Chariandy After a stranger asserted her right to butt in front of the brown-skinned Chariandy because she “was born here,” he had a difficult time explaining what happened to his then three year-old daughter. I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You is his attempt to do just that. Written as a letter to his…
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by Noam Chomsky Fateful Triangle is Noam Chomsky’s analysis of the relationship among the US, Israel, and Palestine. While most of the book centres on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, he talks about the history of conflict and subjugation within Israel, beginning with the country’s origins, moving through the expansionist period post-1967, and…
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