RaveForeword ReviewsIn IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives, Chris Stedman seeks to answer \'what it means to be digital and to reframe our frustrating, fascinating, and fraught digital lives as a new opportunity to ask persistently difficult questions about what it means to be human.\' ... Stedman is at ease in the existential, both digitally and IRL (in real life) ... IRL is a fascinating contribution to this all-important conversation.
E. J. White
PositiveForeword Reviews... offers a delightful eavesdrop of conversations over the centuries, paying particular attention to the city’s unmistakable dialect and why it has proceeded to earn such derision. It’s complicated ... To explain why New Yorkers talk the way they do, White explores slang, swearing, social class, economics, high culture, and the constant turnover of real estate. She lets the city do the talking and tells what may be the quintessential American story.
Bonnie Tsui
PositiveForeword ReviewProfiles of Olympic swimmers, long distance swimmers, and others who swim in brutally cold water for therapeutic reasons punctuate the text, in addition to Tsui’s own lifelong experiences in water. In all, Why We Swim is a celebration of the many varieties of joy that swimming brings to our oxygen-breathing species. That we choose to swim, knowing the danger, can only be explained by the pleasure it brings.
Joyce Sutphen
PositiveForeword ReviewsPrecise in the language of everyday, rich in wisdom and maturity, Joyce Sutphen’s newest collection, her eighth, speaks to her comfort with farm life, travel, aging, the distortions of memory. Sutphen is Minnesota’s poet laureate and a professor emeritus at Gustavus Adolphus College.
Stephen Harrigan
RaveForeword ReviewsHarrigan uses his stupendous storytelling skills to great effect. He covers the state’s major historical events from inventive angles, introduces newly discovered archaeological and archival research, and excels at puffing up many of Texas’s larger-than-life personalities.
James P. Delgado
PositiveForeword Reviews... awe-inspiring ... With recent advances in underwater technology, the pace of discovery has quickened, and Delgado chronologically updates the ledger of new finds—grave markers on the world’s sea floor—from the ancient world to the Viking age, royal navy battles of Western Europe, Colonial America, the US Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Cold War.
Michael Pembroke
PositiveForeword ReviewsMichael Pembroke’s Korea: Where the American Century Began is unremitting in detailing the politics at play in Korea’s recent history, as well as in previous centuries when the Korean people distinguished themselves as one of the great cultures of Asia, but this project will be remembered for showcasing how America’s militarism has its roots in the recent Korean conflicts.
Ada Limón
RaveForeword ReviewsThe vein of greatness that pulses through the work of Ada Limón is remarkably subtle, in the same way that beauty in a human isn’t a rote assemblage of chiseled noses, high cheekbones, and full lips. Her extraordinary poems act the part of an autumn leaf slowly descending from on high—only when it reaches the ground, and you regroup your thoughts, do you realize that you witnessed something mesmerizing.
Kai Carlson-Wee
PositiveForeword ReviewsKai Carlson-Wee lays it out there in this shy, wistful, forthright collection, and the mark is now winningly shared with the reader.
