Roisu read and liked Morgan's review of Living My Life (Penguin Classics):

"In a time when even the farthest flung reaches of the American left are actually sorta psyched about a presidential candidate, the words of Emma Goldman come as a refreshing kick in the pants. Her writing explodes with life, bursting with an unabashe...more In a time when even the farthest flung reaches of the American left are actually sorta psyched about a presidential candidate, the words of Emma Goldman come as a refreshing kick in the pants. Her writing explodes with life, bursting with an unabashedly anarchist ideology. The book reads like a who's-who of late 19th/early 20th century anarchism, rich with colorful details chronicling the events and differences within the movement. All the while, Emma Goldman keeps it personal, relating all these political philosophies and goings on to her own lived experience. The layout of the book is superb—each page bears a synopsis of its contents in the upper margin. Headings such as, "Erotic experiences of my childhood," or, "The president dies. Am I sorry?" make Goldman's memoir an accessible read. Read this book and be swept off your feet.(less) "

Roisu read and liked Bart's review of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

"When Thomas Pynchon invented what James Wood later named “hyper realism”, he did literature no favors. To read Pynchon is to witness genius at its most joyless. A mind capable of inventing myriad things and compelled to record them all. But at...more When Thomas Pynchon invented what James Wood later named “hyper realism”, he did literature no favors. To read Pynchon is to witness genius at its most joyless. A mind capable of inventing myriad things and compelled to record them all. But at least Pynchon showed genius.

What Jonathan Safran Foer shows, however, is mere gimmickry. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close takes readers who thought they might have seen a glimmer of greatness in Everything is Illuminated and convinces them all they really saw were special effects.

It’s very difficult to read Foer’s second novel without reflecting on his first. Everything is Illuminated began in such an original way that a reader forgave the 150 or so dull pages of less-than-compelling writing that came along throughout the rest of the book. The reader forgave the puerile reflections on the Holocaust and the manufactured confession of homosexuality. Because the book began so originally.

But Foer is a one-trick pony. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, he’s once more co-opted a mass tragedy and made a fruit salad of it with various voices and narrative tricks. Oh sure, the book has an underlying tone of sadness – sadness, not seriousness – because, clever as he wants to be, Foer didn’t dare go wholehog with a tragedy still as fresh as 9/11. But that’s about the only restriction he put on his vanity.

To indulge himself with a hundred irritating digressions and quips, Foer invented a child narrator. This has become more and more common among the hyper-realism set in the last 10 years. Raised by guidance counselors who told them to never stop being childish, these novelists give us hundreds of pages of “exploring their inner child” – all under the guise of serious artistic endeavor.

But this is not serious art. This is an author who makes the easy choice every time. When he thinks he has something profound to say, he doesn’t hesitate to have his nine-year-old narrator couch things in college-level language. The rest of the time, when he feels like writing about whichever page of the encyclopedia he happened to turn to that morning, he has the little professor wander off wherever he wishes, always with a literary safety net that says, “I’m trying to depict the world through a child’s eyes!”

But we should ask ourselves why a novelist feels compelled to depict a mass tragedy through a child’s eyes. After all, this isn’t biography; Foer could have depicted the tragedy through anyone’s eyes at all. Better put, when he sat down to write about the savagery of Napoleon’s 1812 battle with Russia, why didn’t Leo Tolstoy depict the burning of Moscow through the eyes of a nine-year-old and his nutty and mute grandfather? Probably because a nine-year-old would have limited Tolstoy’s vocabulary too drastically; a nine-year-old doesn’t know enough to say anything original about war.

Tolstoy, in other words, was too concerned about making an original commentary to worry about being a “fresh new voice!” in the contemporary fiction scene. Tolstoy took a large subject and made it larger. Foer takes a large subject and makes it tiny.

But sometimes, I’ve learned, large things must be tiny. That’s how Foer’s narrator would say it. And he’d be wrong, of course. But then, that’s why we don’t publish books written by nine-year-olds.(less) "