OK, first off, so you won’t be thinking about it for the rest of this review: “Nepenthe, Wikipedia tells us, is “a fictional medicine for sorrow — a ‘drug of forgetfulness’ mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology.” The best-known usage is in Poe’s “The Raven”: “Quaff, oh quaff this kind Nepenthe and forget […]
Bill Cassel
Posted inArts + Scene
The Invention of Nature
Alexander Von Humboldt is not exactly a household name in 21st-Century America. I, for one, knew almost nothing about him, even after living in the county bearing his name for several years. But in his day, he was “as famous as Napoleon,” the ultimate science rock star — Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye the Science […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Girl Waits with Gun
Amy Stewart is familiar to most people in Humboldt County as A) co-owner of Eureka Books and B) a successful author of nonfiction, most recently the bestselling The Drunken Botanist. (She’s also a former Journal columnist.) Now she has decided to try her hand at fiction with the historical novel Girl Waits with Gun. But […]
Posted inArts + Scene
When in Florence
“The streets met at odd angles, and urine reeked in the alleys. No one living in here could forget his basic humanity.” (When in Florence, p. 32.) This not a new book; it was published in 1986, but I only recently stumbled across it. And newness isn’t everything. In fact, sometimes it’s best to let […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Lady-Fame
Lady-Fame or The Fluke technically qualifies as a memoir, though it feels like an insult to call it one, given the way that term’s been degraded in recent years. The events depicted herein are taken, we are led to believe, from Peter Santino’s real life, though one passage, about a third of the way through, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Spent
The very existence of this book stands as a testament to one of the oldest clichés there is: Sex sells. If it didn’t, Spent would never have been published, and I wouldn’t be reviewing it; let’s admit that right up front. This is not meant as a slam on Antonia Crane, who tells her story […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Bleeding Edge
Early on in Bleeding Edge, fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow-Loeffler observes: “Paranoia is the garlic in life’s kitchen, right, you can never have too much.” And that’s Thomas Pynchon in a nutshell; paranoia is his medium, and his whole 40-some-year career has been an exploration of its various shades and manifestations. Given that, why has it […]