A few things I've written

"A Little Life" is a big book, and it demands more than one review. So here we go. 1. The Gut Review: OH MY GODDDD WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY (long loud messy sobbing ensues) 2. The Analytical Critic Guy Review: The effects of "A Little Life" are well known, but what of the causes? Just how does Hanya Yanagihara get us there... How us she get us to keep reading, despite all the horrible things that keep happening, despite our knowledge that things are only going to keep getting worse? The answer is that she's crafty. This is an emotionally punishing read, but it's also a gripping page turner. The mystery at its center is, of course, Jude, and Yanigihara lets his backstory out in varying dribs and drabs: sometimes an odd word choice offers a clue; sometimes we're hit over the head with 50-page-long flashbacks of pure horror. Sometimes we hear his story in a limited third-person perspective, other times we see it through the first person eyes of a friend. The va...

Your white parents love hockey because of its "culture," because of its "classy" "class-act" players who put "the team before themselves," because of its unrelentingly self-effacing public image, because of its emphasis on "tradition," because if a skater is not skating hard enough, they won't be skating for much longer.  Your white parents love hockey because it's, basically, not basketball, with its "egos," its "thuggery," its "selfishness," its "bling," its "disrespect," its "classlessness." The contrast is clear as day, at least to the eye of the average, probably otherwise decent baby boomer.  Hockey culture stands for teamwork, discipline, perseverance, grit, humility.  Basketball culture embraces the wild (black) individual who alternates between whining about calls and bragging about dunks. It would be perhaps too easy to characterize one of these games as conve...

I became a politically engaged person in high school.  Toward the end of George W. Bush's first term, I remember distinctly reading two books-- "Bushwacked" by the late Texas journalist Molly Ivins, and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" by the might-as-well-be-late, appropriately disgraced Senator Al Franken-- that more or less made me a liberal for life.  Those books hit me right where I was at; in that moment, it was clear that the Democratic party was the place to go if you had anything in your chest resembling a heart and anything in your head resembling a brain.  (I made a T-shirt with the phrase "A Distorted Reality is Now a Necessity to Be Free" Sharpied on-- that's an (okay) Elliott Smith song with a great, still relevant title.)  Besides, the only teenagers who supported Bush were total nerds.  That president was just so obviously a moron and a thief and a frat-bro bully... You could only justify his absurd abuses of power if your b...