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ABOUTNow in its 14th year of publication, this magazine was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Black Lamb Review is a literate rather than a literary publication. Regular columns by writers in a variety of geographic locations and vocations are supplemented by features, reviews, articles on books and authors, and a selection of “departments,” including an acerbic advice column and a lamb recipe. SUBMISSIONSBlack Lamb welcomes submissions from new writers. Email us. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'Book Reviews' CategorySic transit horror mundiReading in prisonJune 1st, 2016 BY DEAN SUESS The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World I take for my inspiration the somewhat geeky, wannabe metrosexual (“Why do they think I’m gay?”) A.J. Jacobs, Senior Editor of Esquire and author of this quirky memoir, which chronicles Jacobs’s ambitious project of reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Jacobs’s book is loosely organized by letter of the alphabet. Within this purported order, it proceeds in cheerful disarray, which suits my reading preferences just fine. Few things appeal to me as much as aimless wandering, and Jacobs happily wanders haphazardly through the Britannica, plowing through volume after volume, trying to gain unstructured knowledge. While Jacobs does achieve some wisdom through this project, he mostly proves himself a hopeless dilettante. Dilettantism works fine for me and my fellow prisoners; it goes hand in hand with the disordered chaos of our lives, much of which is governed by acronyms: ADD, ADHD, XYZ, WHATEVER. The more convulted, the less direct, the more puzzling and specious, the better we like it. It is something we can identify with. Excepting Jacobs’s flights of intellectual fancy, and his obsession with Mensa membership, this book is for us a perfect, jumbled read.¹ All of which goes to prove a point Jacobs makes in his introduction: “I used to be smart… then… I began a long, slow slide into dumbness… At age thirty-five I’ve become embarrassingly ignorant. If things continue at this rate, by my fortieth birthday, I’ll be spending my days watching Wheel of Fortune and drooling into a bucket.” Which is exactly the state to which one of my recent cellies has been reduced. Throughout the book — which is catalogued 031-General Information, sharing shelf space with The New York Times Book of Lists — Jacobs tries to reconcile his own sense of self-worth (IQ-based) with the dreaded Ebbinghaus “forgetfulness” curve (curse?). I suggest it is a losing proposition.²
Posted by: The Editors A decent manBetrayal in WisconsinJune 1st, 2016 BY GREG ROBERTS Recollections Of A Long Life: 1829-1915 I like reading books that no one has heard of. The 1950 memoirs of Valentin R. Garfias, Garf From Mexico, was limited to 2,000 copies, one of which was discarded by Cal State University, Hayward, ending up at a Salvation Army store. An excellent read — and if you do read it, you are one of only dozens, like Spix macaws.
Is it an important work? Very important. Just because something is obscure says nothing. Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat languished for more than a century before it was rediscovered. And what about Moby Dick? So there.
Posted by: The Editors Big DaveBefore Dylan, Dave Van Ronk was the bull gooseJune 1st, 2016 BY ED GOLDBERG The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir One night on MacDougal Street, one of the major thoroughfares in Greenwich Village, I was listening to Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight, a cellar folk club much mentioned in this book. It was, maybe, 1962. The cliche description of Van Ronk as a “bear of a man†was both easy and correct. He was big, broad, bearded, and lank-haired; his head almost hit the top of the proscenium. Two drunk high school kids sat at one of the minuscule tables and kept up a loud conversation during Dave’s set. He warned them twice, but they resumed chattering before long.
Posted by: The Editors Raiders of the lost tombsArchaeological adventure novelsJune 1st, 2016 BY JOHN M. DANIEL American Caliphate Were’s a spellbinding archaeological novel about a “dig†(archaeologists prefer the term “excavationâ€) on the north coast of Peru, the ancient home of the Moche Indians, who built adobe pyramids. These pyramids, and one pyramid in particular, are of particular interest to a team of North American academic archaeologists, but in this high-stakes adventure novel there are other parties equally interested in what might be found inside a certain tomb. The CIA, for example. The Vatican. A strong-minded old Muslim woman in Lima. And whoever it was that shot and nearly killed Ben and Jila, a pair of romantically involved archaeologists, the last time they poked around the Santiago de Paz pyramids. American Caliphate has a cast of intelligent, risk-taking characters driven by academic jealousy, political intrigue, religious rivalry, love and lust, outright greed, and insatiable nosiness about the ancient past. The plot is full of danger and discovery. And what these archaeologists discover may confirm rumors that Muslims fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal brought Islam to the New World.
Posted by: The Editors An instant classicA novel in verse for the agesJanuary 1st, 2016 BY BRAD BIGELOW Human Landscapes from My Country One of the drawbacks to running my website is that I rarely read books that are still in print. Browsing in new bookstores is always frustrating. I find things I’d love to read but then struggle to justify the time away from reading books I should cover on the site.
But I soon found myself five pages into the book, almost inhaling the text like air. Although written (mostly) in blank verse, Hikmet’s style is transparent and effortless to read. Unlike the only other verse novel I’ve read (Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which I did enjoy and do admire greatly), Human Landscapes from My Country could be published as prose with little effect on the meaning — though certainly not the form — of the text. I decided to buy it, and I read over 150 pages in the course of our flight back. I went on to devour its more than 450 pages in the course of a few days.
Posted by: The Editors Nobel thrillerPatrick Modiano surprisesJanuary 1st, 2016 BY M.A.ORTHOFER After the Circus After the Circus seems like a very simple story. The Modiano-like narrator relates events from when he was eighteen; in contrast to many of this author’s works, in which he often (re)considers and comments on events and his actions of the past from a later or present-day perspective, Modiano barely intrudes on the timeline here, making for even greater immediacy to the story than usual. He does describe revisiting one of the locales, café, from his story at one point, ten years later, around 1973; once outside: “I stupidly broke down in sobs,†a rare emotional outburst from Modiano’s otherwise so passive and passionless alter-ego-protagonists. This prefigures just how devastating the blow to come to the eighteen-year-old in The opening of the novel already suggests vague menace and unease, the young narrator being questioned by the police. He doesn’t know why, and when he asks at the end of the interrogation is simply told “Your name was in someone’s address book†— without being told whose. The names he is questioned about are ones he doesn’t recognize, so he is left with no idea what they think he might be mixed up in. The narrator is a young man of barely-formed personal identity. He’s escaped from six hellish years at boarding school, with hardly any family support system; his father is in Switzerland — occasionally in contact if often barely understood over the telephone line — and the young man shares an apartment (that soon has to be vacated) with a man named Grabley. Grabley calls him Obligado — a nickname — and it is only very late in the novel that we learn his actual name, Jean. “I was struck that she’d call me by my name,†he says when it is finally revealed, a so-personal marker that only in an extreme situation (“Please, I’m begging you,†she pleads) does it come up.
Posted by: The Editors
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