Mark Stevens's Blog, page 14
August 27, 2022
David Grohl, “The Storyteller”
The first part of The Storyteller, Tales of Life and Music, is excellent. The second half is bit tiresome and repetitive. For my taste, once Grohl has got the Foo Fighters launched, there’s way too much fawning over his fellow … Continue reading →
July 21, 2022
Richard Currey, “Lost Highway”
How do you capture that feeling of playing live music on the page? Like this: “I closed my eyes, hands sighting their own country on the banjo’s face, a sense of place in the coming knowledge that music has traveled, … Continue reading →
July 7, 2022
James Sallis, “Sarah Jane”
Start to finish, Sarah Jane is seductive and tantalizing. It’s also (wonderfully) disorienting. First line: “My name is Pretty, but I’m not.” Second line: “Haven’t been, won’t be.” In the second paragraph, the narrator gives us her true given name—Sarah … Continue reading →
July 3, 2022
Erika Krouse, “Tell Me Everything”
It’s a challenge to wrap your head around this spellbinding memoir that digs as deep on the personal side as it also lays waste to a university jock culture and hyper bureaucratic ivory tower administration that tolerated sexual assault. It’s … Continue reading →
July 1, 2022
Craig Childs, “Tracing Time”
(The following was first published in the Four Corners Free Press, July 2022). History, skeletons, and time. Layers, civilizations, and stories. Signals. Messages. Expressions. It’s all here in the Four Corners region. It’s literally right here. Under our feet. Around … Continue reading →
June 11, 2022
Matt Goldman, “Gone to Dust”
It’s winter in Minnesota. Private eye Nils Shapiro drives an aged Volvo, gets up at the “crack” of 8:55, eats peanut butter sandwiches, and lives in a crappy house that builders want to buy so they can level it and … Continue reading →
May 30, 2022
Chris Holm, “Child Zero”
We got problems. The “new normal” ain’t pretty. There’s a tiny Third World nation in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow. The iconic Tavern on the Green restaurant has been subsumed by the encampment. Inside the camp, everything from shigellosis to typhoid … Continue reading →
May 22, 2022
Wayne Johnson, “Baseball Diaries – Confessions of a Cold War Youth”
Little League tryouts. It’s April in Minnesota. And young Wayne Johnson is both excited and sick to his stomach. He’s feeling inferior, dressed in his too-large cleats and his hand-me-down clothes and toting his beat-up, old Rawlins mitt. And there’s … Continue reading →
May 12, 2022
Jonathan Evison, “Small World”
The day after finishing Small World, I caught a television news spot about how 80 percent of the doughnut shops in southern California are owned by Cambodians. Many of the immigrants settled in the United States in the late 1970’s … Continue reading →
May 7, 2022
William Kent Krueger, “Lightning Strike”
Grounded. Methodical. Logical. Slow-burn. Here are a few more things to like about Lightning Strike: Solid plot. Deceptively violent. Character-based. In fact—character first, character always. And the story stays within itself. It never overflows its banks and goes crazy, even … Continue reading →
