Robert M.Utley, Geronimo. Yale University Press, November, 2012. 376 pages, $30.00. This review appeared in The Oregonian, January 20, 2013. In 2009, Robert Utley called Geronimo the “best-known Indian in the whole world and perhaps the least deserving.” That he had come to this conclusion before completing the biography now published by Yale University Press […]
Reviews
Making Golf Part of the Walkable City
A version of this essay appeared in The Oregonian, November 18, 2012. What the “Walkable City” Means for Golf. Jeff Speck, Walkable City. How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov 13, 2012. $27.00. Urban planner Jeff Speck’s Walkable City is both a forceful analysis of what’s wrong […]
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher–A New Biography of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan.
Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher. The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Houghton Miflin Harcourt, October, 2012. 412 pages, $28.00 A Review Exactly eighty-five years ago this week, Seattle’s “most famous citizen,” returning from a successful summer of field work in Alaska undertaken for the final volume of his monumental […]
Fire in the Ashes by Jonathan Kozol: A Review
Jonathan Kozol, Fire in the Ashes. Twenty-five Years among the Poorest Children in America. Crown Publishers, August 2012, 368 pages, $27.00. Jonathan Kozol’s first book, Death at an Early Age, echoed the engaged intensity of the muckraking journalism of the early 20th century. Published in 1967, it recounted Kozol’s abbreviated tenure teaching in the Boston […]
Review of The Empty Family, by Colm Tóibín
In the spring of 2007, I attended a tribute hosted by Colm Tóibín in honor of novelist John McGahern at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. An enthusiastic audience watched a series of clips from films either written by McGahern or based on his stories, with commentary on each provided by Tóibín. Tóibín spoke of […]
A Review of Arcadia, a Novel by Lauren Goff.
Arcadia, by Lauren Groff. Hyperion, March 13, 2012. 304 pages, $25.99. When I was in graduate school at the University of Rochester in the late sixties, the embers of the Second Great Awakening were still smoldering to ash in upstate New York. Known as the burned-over district because it was aflame with religious fervor, western […]