Month: August 2002

  • Rick Bragg

    In his first memoir, All Over But the Shoutin’, Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Bragg told of his mother’s triumphant struggle to raise three boys in the face of grinding poverty and an abusive, alcoholic husband. Ava’s Man , new to paperback, takes the story back a generation to chronicle his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, a carpenter…

  • Miniatures By Norah Labiner (Coffee House Press)

    Norah Labiner is in love with language. She writes in a great tidal wave of words, logophilia sometimes cresting into babble as she races to tell her story, then jumps back to pick up a detail dropped in the rush, then joyously forward again. Like her first novel, Our Sometime Sister , Miniatures is a…

  • Roofwalker By Susan Power (Milkweed Editions)

    Susan Power is known for her “powerful characters,” but she’s a powerful character herself. She was born in Chicago in 1961 of a mother from Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota and a father from Ithaca, New York. She went through Harvard Law School before entering the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and knocking off her MFA.…

  • Backatcha, Homie

    In his column, “Pick that trash up, homeboy!” [Free the Jackson Five!, May] Clinton Collins wrote, “Oh, I can hear the apologist now…” Well, Mr. Collins, if you step out beyond your own back yard into the community, you can see the institutions that those apologists have built: Pilot City, Father Project, Turning Point, StairStep…

  • Promise or Threat?

    Jeannine Ouellette reverts to simplistic name-calling in her column about Promise Keepers [Wife, Interrupted, August]. Ms. Ouellette states that Promise Keepers has “misogynistic, homophobic, racist underpinnings.” If we examine these labels a bit more, Ms. Ouellette’s charges come up woefully lacking. First, PK has made racial reconciliation a cornerstone of the organization. One of its…

  • The Extreme Column!

    There’s a new father at the restaurant where I work. I asked about his daughter the other day. “She’s doing great,” Dave said, radiating paternal pride. “I took Maya to her six month appointment this afternoon. The doctor said that out of a hundred babies born that same day, she’s the biggest one. Heaviest and…