"No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” — Lily Tomlin
“A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long. “Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. My last YCRT column was all about Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five. Can you stand one more link? It’s a good one. Oh, all right, one more, in honor of the respectable citizens of Republic, Missouri … you know, the ones […]
“Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words – ‘Friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’ – words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some like ‘identity’, […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. I’m starting with an essay on censorship by Chris Crutcher. Crutcher, an author whose books are frequently challenged and banned from school libraries and reading lists, is coming around to the same conclusion I’ve drawn: that parental book challenges are […]
“Young Lamar Jimmerson went to France in 1917 with the American Expeditionary Forces, serving first with the Balloon Section, stumbling about in open fields holding one end of a long rope, and then later as a telephone switchboard operator at AEF headquarters in Chaumont. It was there on the banks of the Marne River that […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. From my last You Can’t Read That! post: Apparently it’s a widely-held belief in anti-gay Christian conservative circles that the government — particularly the jack-booted thugs who run public libraries and schools — foists pro-gay literature on young readers while […]
I started reading a thick paperback yesterday around noon … it looked to be a 400- to 500-pager … but it turned out to be written in blank verse, with just a few words per page. Including breaks for errands, dinner, and the Rachel Maddow Show, I was done by seven. The book was Crank […]
You Can’t Read That! is my new title for banned book reviews and news roundups. From a previous banned book news roundup: Conservative groups who believe in and fear the so-called gay agenda accuse the American Library Association of suppressing books with pro-hetereosexual themes. But 99% of books in libraries implicitly or explicitly endorse heterosexuality, […]