RaveSalon... so valuable ... a terrible story of abject malevolence, betrayal, predation, and — to be extremely generous toward NBC, where Farrow once worked — corporate cowardice, but it\'s also a propulsive, cinematic page-turner ... That may sound like inappropriate, even grotesque, praise. But consider how the \'too far?\' backlash to Me Too manifested almost immediately; the tenacity with which power will protect itself has been evident from the start ... A compelling book that readers can\'t help but want to finish can make an impact, changing hearts and minds by holding scattered collective attention long enough for an understanding of the injustice to truly take root ... Should it matter that ex-Mossad agents working on behalf of a Hollywood mogul lend Catch and Kill a layer of spy-novel intrigue? No, but I suspect it might help spread the book\'s lessons farther and wider than it might without them ... the dose of \'holy shit, no, this story is wild\' that Catch and Kill serves can go a long way toward ensuring that Farrow\'s exposé of how that system works, in all of its damning specificity, will continue to have legs ... Farrow seems keen to keep the focus on the stories of the women who came forward at great personal and professional risk, not on him and his writing ... underscores how much harder it is for women to tell their own stories and be heard ... Farrow balances that moral clarity and his painstaking detailing of his reporting process with vivid prose, wry self-awareness, and an eye for the ominous detail to craft an undeniable page-turner, written in such a way to make a reader want to push on to the next chapter immediately to find out what happens next — even those who could by now, two years\' worth of follow-up news cycles later, recite many of the facts and outcomes of this investigation by heart.
Alma Katsu
RaveSalon\"Known for flavoring her literary page-turners with the supernatural, in this novel she combines meticulous historical research and a keen understanding of human nature with a monstrous original metaphor to reimagine the ill-fated Donner-Reed party as a haunted endeavor, doomed from its first mile ... The Hunger exposes our innate and seemingly limitless capacity for violence as a thing Americans literally spread across the country, a rotten Manifest Destiny of the soul. It\'s somewhat heartening that Katsu, through a wildly different kind of story, draws a similar conclusion to Clement: maybe it’s not an unshakable curse. Maybe we can find a way to survive ourselves.\
Jennifer Clement
RaveSalon\"Through a memorable coming-of-age story set in America’s margins, Clement makes all of these things true at once: A gun is a valentine, a secret-bearer, a penitent, a world destroyer, an exposed belly, an insurance policy, a sudden act of God ... It might be tempting to read this novel merely as an exemplar of the neo-Southern grotesque — a lush, humid tale of rural hard-lucks made all the more strange by the incongruous beauty of Clement’s lyric prose — but Gun Love is neither swampy freak show nor poverty porn. Rather it’s a fable of modern American violence, and the resilience it takes to survive a childhood in its shadow.\
Ijeoma Oluo
RaveSalonAccessible and approachable in tone, So You Want to Talk About Race is aimed squarely at those who actually do. In other words, this isn’t a book to pass quietly to your slur-spewing uncle in hopes of getting him to stop sharing odious Obama memes on Facebook, nor is it an instruction manual on how to \'not see race\' ... Oluo weaves stories from her own life through her research to put faces and voices to such fraught topics... As a result, the lessons, while still intellectually rigorous, feel more intimate than those gleaned from academic texts and perhaps more likely to make a meaningful impression on the lay reader ... Throughout her book, Oluo emphasizes how difficult these conversations about race will be, but also how necessary and urgent they are for people to have in good faith ... She invites the reader to \'get a little uncomfortable,\' because racial inequality and injustice are real — we can\'t \'wish it away.\'
Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele
RaveSalonAnd so the title of Patrisse Khan-Cullors’ triumphant life story, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir is a deliberate, courageous and necessary rebuttal of the propaganda that would undermine the Black Lives Matter movement by painting it, absurdly, as 'hate.' Written with journalist and author asha bandele, Khan-Cullors charts her development as an activist and community organizer from childhood to now, as one of the three creators of #BlackLivesMatter and the movement that grew out of their hashtag... What’s remarkable about her story is that for all of her earned anger against the systems and institutions that perpetuate racial inequality — too often to fatal ends —Khan-Cullors’ narrative is brimming with love ... Khan-Cullors and bandele paint a vivid portrait of growing up in 1990s Van Nuys, a poor black and Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles... Throughout the book, Khan-Cullors and bandele personalize the radical love that fuels her work's theory and praxis.
Thomas Pierce
RaveSalon\"...[an] excellent novel ... The Afterlives is sprinkled with Black Mirror-style futuristic touches — like an explosion in popularity of unnerving AI holograms in workplaces and public spaces — which dance along the border of very cool and creepy ... Pierce’s tale unfolds loosely but deliberately, cutting across timelines to weave in the story of what went down in that restaurant’s stairwell once upon a time, and who else, now living or dead, might have been involved. The Afterlives is as much a dialogue and an attempt at reconciliation between faith and science as it is a contemplation of the opportunities of second chances.\
Chloe Benjamin
RaveSalon...[an] excellent novel ... Benjamin wisely resists telling the reader whether the shape each life takes is destiny or not. Billed as in the vein of Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng and Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings — high praise and apt comparisons — The Immortalists also reminded me strongly of Karen Joy Fowler’s award-winning 2013 dissection of the mysterious and complicated family bonds, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. Like Fowler, Benjamin has mastered the sibling’s tension between intimacy and baffling unknowability.
Linda Gordon
RaveSalonGordon’s book is a must-read for anyone wondering over the last several months how we ended up as a country — with the first African-American president not even a year out of office — facing a group of golf shirt-wearing young white men marching onto the campus of a prestigious university carrying torches and chanting 'Jews will not replace us,' a president who has demonized Mexicans and other immigrants, and unabashed white nationalist ideology from the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka at work in the White House. Gordon documents not only the mechanics of how the Ku Klux Klan roared back to power, both socially and politically, in the 1920s but why. The parallels between then and now, branding differences aside, could not be more evident.
Ed. by John Freeman
MixedSalonThere’s neither glossy escapism nor gritty dystopian metaphor here. Tales of Two Americas is instead committed to a realistic portrayal of the differences between those with easy access to America’s opportunities and those without ... There is so much excellent writing in the pages of Tales of Two Americas. Yet because an anthology is the sum of its parts, I can’t help but see American inequality on display in the contributors’ notes, too, or rather in whom those notes don’t include...Largely absent from the table of contents are those who are currently writing from outside the literary establishment — which offers opportunity, if not always a comfortable salary — even if many of the writers originally hail from humble backgrounds ... I raise this point not to head-count the anthology’s representation nor to criticize Freeman’s work, and certainly not to cast aspersions on the authenticity of the perspectives represented, but to ask a bigger question. Who is this book for? To this reader, the effect is one America — the poorer one — being translated for the intended readers. Which is also not to say that translation isn’t a primary function of literature, but I think of how much more powerful this collection could be if the translation went both ways.
