Mark Zero's Blog, page 4
July 29, 2010
July 24, 2010
Official Website for Give the Drummer Some is live!
The publisher's website for Give the Drummer Some is live and full of features, funky songs and videos about soul music, St. Louis, the history of funk and the record industry. You can take virtual tours of Soulard (the neighborhood in downtown St. Louis where much of the book is set), East St. Louis and [...:]
The Other Side of What
Shannon Yarbrough's first novel The Other Side of What, a languid coming-of-age story with vivid characters and memorable descriptions of its Memphis setting, mimics the process of growing up that it describes, becoming more confident as its story progresses. Ultimately, though, like its narrator, it clings to a naivete that doesn't quite allow it to [...:]
July 15, 2010
Galleys of Give the Drummer Some Just Arrived!
Galley/review copies of my new novel Give the Drummer Some just arrived. We're planning a release party in August when the novel becomes available for sale and a tour in September and October! Give the Drummer Some tells the story of Mouse Watkins, leader of the Bad Apples—the funkiest old school soul band in St. [...:]
April 8, 2010
Castaway in Paradise
Castaway in Paradise, James C. Simmons' compendium of South Seas adventures involving deserters, runaways, pirates and mutineers, has a breezy tone that belies the often horrifying nature of its hand-to-my-heart true stories. The tales of Europeans and Americans on South Seas expeditions that go terribly wrong, Castaway never romanticizes the idea of being abandoned to [...:]
Castaways in Paradise
Castaways in Paradise, James C. Simmons' compendium of South Seas adventures involving deserters, runaways, pirates and mutineers, has a breezy tone that belies the often horrifying nature of its hand-to-my-heart true stories. The tales of Europeans and Americans on South Seas expeditions that go terribly wrong, Castaways never romanticizes the idea of being abandoned to [...:]
March 27, 2010
Beyond Rangoon
The only film in our series of journeys Around the World & Into the Past, Beyond Rangoon features Patricia Arquette as American doctor Laura Bowman, who is traveling through Southeast Asia in 1988 when she gets caught up in the Burmese democratic struggle led by Aung San Suu Kyi.
Far from a vacation, the voyage is [...:]
Far from a vacation, the voyage is [...:]
March 26, 2010
A World Unto Itself: Riding the Iron Rooster through China
Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster begins like the first book in our Around the World and Into the Past series, Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads, with a long train journey to the author's eventual destination. In Greene's case, the journey began in Austin, Texas, and wound circuitously down to Chiapas; in Theroux's case, his [...:]
March 19, 2010
King Leopold's Ghost; or Why There's No Club Med in the Congo
The only non-travelogue in this series of books taking us Around the World and Into the Past, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is a history of Europe's last major slave colony in Central Africa, where the devastating legacy of colonial exploitation continues even now. I have included it in the series because each of the [...:]
March 16, 2010
An Antique Utopia
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is Jan Morris's melancholy love letter to a city that, one hundred years ago, was one of the most bustling ports in Europe but is now largely forgotten. Though Trieste is the capital of the Italian province also named Trieste, 70 percent of Italians polled in 1999 didn't even [...:]
