Dirty Work by Eyal Press (2021) landed in my stack following an interview with the New York Times Book Review editor. Its subtitle—Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America—summarizes the content aptly, but doesn’t express how un-put-down-able I found this book. Most of the time, when
Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it
Picking up yesterday's thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at
At first, I planned to carry on with my non-fiction and fiction rhythm from my booklog. While I was reading up on Lauren Groff to review her new book for The Chicago Review of Books, I came across her essay “The Ambivalent Activist, Jane Roe” in Fight of the
The 1619 Project (Edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein) opens with an epigraph from Langston Hughes, his poem “American Heartbreak 1619”: I am the American heartbreak-- The rock on which freedom Stumped its toe-- The great mistake That Jamestown made Long ago He’s such
