rakemag August 9, 2004 We Minnesotans lament that our summers fly by so quickly, trying to pack so much into so few months of pleasant weather. Then again, we appreciate this yearly opportunity more than, perhaps, residents of southern California. During San Diego’s recent “Battle at the Bridges” golf tournament, a commentators mention the perfect weather: … Read more
August 18, 2004 For a wine drinker, especially one who prefers the big reds, cool August weather is not all bad news. Out the other night to the Metrodome, to witness the trouncing of my beloved Yankees (I can’t help it, I grew up there!) by those bully Twins, I was intimately aware of how … Read more
Robert Bly has so many projects going on at once, it’s hard to know whether to believe him when he threatens to publish another collection of poetry or razor-sharp social commentary. People know him as the man who launched a movement on behalf of his gender, and they may even know he’s a world-class poet. … Read more
Tara had it all: She was young, beautiful, married to one of the smartest, richest men in America. Now she finds herself divorced and middle-aged. In The Tree Bride, Indian expatriate Mukherjee picks up Tara’s story where she left off in Desirable Daughters. As Tara dives into the story of her ancestor, the Tree Bride … Read more
Every unhappy family is unique, Leo Tolstoy reminds us, which might be one reason for the rich vein of stories about children coping with a broken home, including this highly praised first novel. Lychack, whom you might have heard on This American Life, frankly admits that the nine-year-old protagonist of Wasp Eater is autobiographical in … Read more
Odell’s childhood in small-town Mississippi and participation in the Civil Rights movement gave him a full well of memories to draw upon for his debut novel. A View From Delphi opens with Hazel Ishee, the young daughter of a white Mississippi farmer, seeing a photograph of herself for the first time and discovering that she … Read more
It’s tempting to join the grumbling about the staggering genius that is Dave Eggers. But we welcome one of the latest products from his literary empire, out August 10, in part because it contains a piece by Twin Citizen and sometime Rake contributor Keith Pille. Pille’s work, along with many other pieces in this compendiumÑparodies, … Read more
Let’s steal a riff from Spy, shall we? Here’s the equation for Open Water: Two divers stranded mid-ocean + lo-fi camerawork + huge film-festival buzz / Blair Witch Project x Captain Quint’s USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws = scaring the living heck out of us. You might have seen the unnerving trailer before Fahrenheit 9/11, … Read more
We get the impression that this all-star smackdown from beyond the stars is shooting for the quality level of the cheesier of its two battlin’ sci-fi franchises – namely Predator, the movie that gave us the Ventura credo, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” But for a late-summer fix of lasers and monsters and stuff … Read more
Five of the very best examples of 1940s-era crime thrillers. There’s too much here to praise in the space we have at hand, so let’s concentrate on three examples of great acting. First: Out of the Past’s Robert Mitchum, in a career-defining performance, trying to escape his ties to gangster Kirk Douglas. Second: Sterling Hayden … Read more