RaveLambda Literary... was worth waiting for ... The previously published essays, like Sacks’s books, are enormously readable and erudite. We are familiar with Sacks the meticulous researcher and eloquent explicator of science for the layperson, but new to us are the meditations, prose poems, and ponderings offered here, some in chapters as brief as two pages ... Tantalizingly, Sacks illuminates paths for research not yet conducted ... As long as people are still reading Sacks, in spite of what they’re doing with their glowing devices, this reader will continue to harbor optimism for our species.
Jamie James
RaveLambda LiteraryJust beneath a decorous surface, Jamie James has given us a 2000-year chronicle of depravity, joy, and anguish on a tiny limestone island. A bit deeper still, we find loosely connected, sometimes penetrating biographies that comprise a scholarly history. Readers who are led by the title to expect a pleasantly innocuous travel guide will be surprised, possibly even a bit shocked, by this multifaceted book, which includes the accounts of the likely suicides of two of Europe’s wealthiest men ... Despite some titillation, Pagan Light is valuable to scholars, providing resources that direct academic readers toward in-depth study. We read snatches of poetry and excerpts from letters, diaries, novels, and chronicles produced over two millennia. Most of the translation—from Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German—is James’s own. The authors of some of his cited source materials created exhaustive histories of Capri during various periods. From my own limited study, their work, although thorough, appears to lack the vibrancy of his ... With his measured tone and bemused skepticism about the lurid claims of certain writers, James confirms that he is not drawing us into a tangle of rumors.
Bill Cunningham
PositiveLambda LiteraryIn an era when breathless tell-all memoirs are rushed to press, how refreshing to read a somewhat discreet memoir whose existence the author revealed only after the end of his fabulously colorful life ... Fashion Climbing is both refreshing and surprising. For any of us who don’t think much about fashion, the book is a revelation ... Not so fast, you rumor-mongers. Cunningham certainly reveals plenty of scandalous behavior, most involving the one sin he considered unpardonable: a lack of originality. But he took any personal sexual secrets, his own or anyone else’s, with him beyond the grave ... Cunningham’s central message seems to be that an artist is better off retaining integrity and living on Ovaltine.
Patrick Nathan
RaveLambda LiteraryThe writing is compelling, the characters heartbreakingly believable, and, although their circumstances can sound astonishing when described out of context, they are very much like the circumstances that have challenged, tempered, hardened, and sustained me and people I love ... Nathan writes beautifully, without sentimentality. When we think a maudlin moment may have arrived, he yanks our chain ... Notably absent from the book is any attempt to entertain the reader with humor. If we laugh, we laugh with wry recognition ... More clearly than anything else I have encountered, Some Hell shows a person growing into the eroticized experience of punishment, fear, humiliation, and even pain ... instead of settling in with the narrator’s voice and becoming acquainted with the characters, I found myself waiting for a very specific, very big event. Once I had encountered that event, I went back and re-started the book at page one.
