Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Sept/Oct/Nov 2011 India’s economic ascent has launched a flurry of books, most of them touting neoliberalism’s power to not only propel the country out of poverty but to chase away its unsightly caste and class divisions, its nasty penchant for pogroms and female feticide. Siddhartha Deb’s very fine The Beautiful and the Damned tells [...]
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India
Posted in Reviews, tagged Arindam Chaudhuri, liberalization, review of The Beautiful and the Damned, Siddhartha Deb, The Beautiful and the Damned, the new India on September 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Beautiful Monsters: A review of The Art of Cruelty
Posted in Reviews, tagged Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, Maggie Nelson, review of The Art of Cruelty, Sylvia Plath, The Art of Cruelty on August 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Bookforum, Summer 2o11 Take an apartment. Trash it thoroughly. Strip. Smear yourself with blood, bind your wrists, and bend over a table. Wait for your friends to discover your “corpse.” Too much? Take a city sidewalk. Take a bucket of “blood.” Splatter. Hide. Look at people looking at the “blood.” How much is too much? [...]
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Posted in Reviews, tagged Daniel Malakov, Janet Malcolm, Mazoltuv Borukhova, Mikhail Mallayev, review of Iphigenia in Forest Hills on April 16, 2011 | 2 Comments »
by Janet Malcolm (Yale Univ.) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Apr. 12, 2011 Janet Malcolm is to malice what Wordsworth was to daffodils. In nine previous books, she’s so thoroughly, so indelibly investigated a certain breed of malice—the kind that festers in the writer-subject relationship—that it ought to bear her name. Malice is journalism’s “animating impulse,” she [...]
Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War
Posted in Reviews, tagged Deb Olin Unferth, Nicaragua, review of Revolution, Sandalista, Sandinista on March 13, 2011 | 2 Comments »
by Deb Olin Unferth, Henry Holt $24 Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York, February 16, 2010 Revolution calls itself a memoir, but Deb Olin Unferth’s tale of dropping out of college to join the Sandinista revolution is something altogether stranger and more dazzling: It’s a virtuosic one-woman show. The story itself is simple: High on a potent [...]
The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence
Posted in Reviews, tagged Gilles Peress, James Nachtwey, On Photography, photography, review of The Cruel Radiance, Robert Capa, Susan Sontag, Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance on December 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
By Susie Linfield (University of Chicago) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum, December 2010 The girl in the photograph wears her black hair tucked behind her ears. Her part is slightly crooked, and there is a small mole low on her throat, right above the top button of her blouse. She might be anywhere between five and ten years [...]
Saul Bellow: Letters
Posted in Reviews, tagged Benjamin Taylor, Review of Saul Bellow: Letters, Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow: Letters on December 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Edited by Benjamin Taylor, Viking, $35 Parul Sehgal, Time Out New York, November 5, 2010 Collected and annotated by Benjamin Taylor, these letters reveal in Saul Bellow a rare consistency: From the first letter in 1932 to the last in 2005, Bellow’s ex-wives accrue, his fortunes rise and fall, but his character, his generosity and obsession with [...]
Cleopatra: A Life
Posted in Reviews, tagged Alexandria, Caesar, Cicero, Cleopatra, Egypt, Horace, Julius Cesar, Marc Antony, Octavian, Review of Cleopatra, Stacy Schiff on November 2, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum, November 2010 They called her the Queen of Kings. She built a kingdom into a mighty empire that stretched down the shimmering eastern coastline of the Mediterranean. She married—and murdered—her two younger brothers. She bankrolled Cesar and Antony and bore them both sons. She was worshipped as [...]
Yellow Dirt
Posted in Reviews, tagged Canadian Tar Sands, Judy Pasternak, leetso, Manhattan Project, Navajo, review of Yellow Dirt, Yellow Dirt on October 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Judy Pasternak (Free Press) Parul Sehgal, PWxyz, Oct. 28 Here are the facts: In the summer of 1943, surveyors from the Manhattan Project began poking around a Navajo reservation that blanketed parts of Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. They were looking for uranium. They found it. Navajo miners blasted open the mesa and hauled out [...]
The Emperor of All Maladies
Posted in Reviews, tagged biography of cancer, cancer, O Magazine book review, review of The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee on October 21, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
By Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner) Parul Sehgal, O Magazine, November 2010 For 4,000 years, cancer has stalked us. Even as cholera and tuberculosis—the scourges of the 19th century—wilted in the wake of medical advancements and vigorous public health campaigns, the cancer cell continued to bloom. Ubiquitous but taboo (The New York Times refused to print the [...]
How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior
Posted in Reviews, tagged Eliot Spitzer, How to Become a Scandal, James Frey, Laura Kipnis, Linda Tripp, Lisa Nowack, review of How to Become a Scandal, scandal, Sol Wachtler, taboo, transgression on September 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
By Laura Kipnis (Holt) Parul Sehgal, Bookforum Sept. 20, 2010 Everything you think you know about James Frey is wrong. You’re wrong about Eliot Spitzer, too, and Linda Tripp, and any number of those nutty and libidinous rogues in our public pillories. According to Laura Kipnis’s coruscating new study of scandal, what we talk about [...]
