In his 1653 book The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton declared the carp the queen of the rivers, and the species is still highly regarded as an angling prize in Britain and the rest of Europe. Anglers on this side of the pond still reject the monarchy, and the carp is generally regarded as a trash … Read more
Despite the barely noticed building boom that’s spreading faster than scandal through residential sections of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul—especially along the suddenly vogue Mississippi River—there are no serious office buildings in the works. Where are the new skyscrapers? The last major high-rise built here was U.S. Bank Place, finished in 1992. Perhaps a more … Read more
Some authors have an impressive body of work; Michael Sims has an impressive work on the body. His Adam’s Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form is both informative and entertainingly digressive. Taking stock of his subject literally from head to toe, Sims offers a remarkably thorough catalog of our body parts, … Read more
Even for an astrophysicist, Lucienne lives in a world overfilled with black holes. The heroine of N.M. Kelby’s second novel, Theater of the Stars, has just had the biggest success of her career, finding one of the mysterious, light-eating spatial anomalies. But the rest of her life is a case study in entropy. Her marriage … Read more
Falling in love a second time is a trip through treacherous waters—you might be able to remember where the river’s most dangerous rocks are from the first time around, but that’s no guarantee you won’t hit them again. For the title character of Tim Farrington’s The Monk Downstairs, it’s only more complex for being on … Read more
If Chuck Palahniuk seems fixated on violence and abandonment, he has good reason—his grandparents died in a murder-suicide, and his father was killed a few years ago by a jealous ex-husband. So the level of attention paid to confusion, loss, and anger in his books is totally understandable. There’s no denying the raw emotional turmoil—and … Read more
Jon Krakauer’s stock in trade is human behavior in the most extreme of conditions, as seen in his harrowing bestseller Into Thin Air, a firsthand account of disaster on Mount Everest. His latest book takes readers into a world that will seem as remote and forbidding, and all the more alien for existing on American … Read more
To look at the tidy little house at 48th and York, you’d think the fire that killed Pearl Gallagher on June 14 didn’t really amount to much. Sheets of plywood cover the windows, but there are no flame-scarred walls, no singed rafters. The flower garden just beyond the front door blooms as if nothing happened. … Read more
It’s late afternoon and State Auditor Pat Awada is negotiating southbound traffic on 35E in her white Jeep Cherokee, one hand on the wheel, the other occupied with a Marlboro Light that she ashes out her open window. She brushes a length of long blonde hair from her deep blue eyes and considers the impact … Read more
On the first day Pat Awada met with The Rake, she mentioned a behavioral analysis test she had taken in 2001, prior to an Eagan City Council retreat. Our writer was amused to be told about the test, but did not expect much more than that. Then, three days later, she arrived at her weekly … Read more