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Fiction I was born dead THE WHITE CRUCIFIXION By Michael Dean 256 pp. Holland Park Press Reviewed by Marty Carlock “On a highly auspicious day, the seventh day of the seventh month, I was born dead.” What an opening sentence! How can we not read on?   The narrator born dead is Moyshe Shagal, known to us now as Marc Chagall, painter of dreamlike fabulist scenes. The White Crucifixion is a fictional autobiography. The opening paragraph continues: “I was brought back to life by the midwife holding me in a tub of cold water, then lifting me out again. I went from black to blue to pink. Then a fire broke out.” According to this author, Chagall’s paintings refer to actual events in his life, and the figures painted, whether flying (some are) or grounded, are pictures of actual people. My painting of the scene, Birth , shows a claustrophobic single-room izba pressed down by a low crooked ceiling. By a red-canopied bed, a midwife is holding a baby. There is a proud father present, and a co...

Nonfiction The Syrian humanitarian catastrophe HARA HOTEL A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece By Teresa Thornhill 354 pp. Verso Reviewed by Tom Glenn Teresa Thornhill, a middle-aged Briton, worked with Syrian refugees at the Hara Hotel in Greece in 2016 for two weeks. Several months later, she went to Austria to meet with one young Syrian Kurd she had helped and to record the story of his clandestine walk through the mountains of Macedonia and his journey on foot through Serbia and Hungary. At the beginning of 2017, she returned briefly to Greece to learn what had happened to the Syrians she had tried to help. These three trips make up the three parts of Hara Hotel , a book that details the misery of the hapless Syrian refugees. Woven through the story is the history of the rebellion against the bloodthirsty regime of Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad; the rise of Daesh (acronym for the Arabic phrase al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham , that is, the Islamic State of Iraq an...

--> Fiction The fickle nature of fame MODERN LOVERS By Emma Straub 353 pp. Riverhead Books Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D. The central character of this book is a young woman named Ruby, “a black Jew with lesbian moms.”  When the book begins, she is a senior but hates high school and the SAT as well. She likes a lad named Dust who sports a shaved head and a chipped tooth and is good at skateboarding and oral sex. Ruby’s moms – Jane and Zoe, run a very successful restaurant, Hyacinth, in the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Zoe spends her time hunched over her computer, working on the payroll and the schedules and the billing for the restaurant. Jane dreams of heirloom tomatoes from New Jersey, perfect soft-shelled crabs and corn so fresh “you could just peel the silk back and eat the kernels right off the cob” when she isn’t cooking. In college Zoe and Jane were “screwing every day between one period and the next,” but now not at all and they are barely talking. An...

Limits of the Known, by David Roberts. 336 pp. New York: Norton ISBN 978-0393609868 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore After half a lifetime of mountaineering, and another half of canyoneering and writing books and magazine features, David Roberts has pulled together the various threads of his life in a book that is part memoir, part historical anthology of notable exploration, and part meditation on the meaning and limits of adventure and adventuring. Its summatory and valedictory flavour come from the autobiographical element, disclosed early on, that the author is living with an aggressive cancer (he guards us against the well-meant but double-edged metaphor of “battling” or “fighting” the disease), already spread and metastasized but against which, as of late 2017 when he finished writing, he was holding his own. Each of the seven chapters of this artfully constructed book interleaves an account of one or more historical expeditions with an episode or aspect of the author’s own life that r...

Fiction Not one of those psychopaths DOMINIC By Mark Pryor 239 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Mystery writer Mark Pryor, best known for his acclaimed and popular Hugo Marston   mystery series, is back with a flawed yet worthy sequel to his equally acclaimed 2015 standalone novel, Hollow Man , (also reviewed on this site) which introduced readers to the most charismatic literary antihero since Tom Ripley. Like the author who created him, Dominic is an Englishman living in Austin, Texas, where he works as a prosecutor by day and spends his nights playing guitar and singing at bars and clubs. Like most Texans, he wears jeans and cowboy boots and carries a pistol wherever he goes. One of the D.A.’s top prosecutors, Dominic has been reassigned from adult to juvenile prosecution – not as a punishment, but because the city is too cheap to hire more prosecutors. Working juvenile means having to accept a steep cut in pay. It also means going from prosecuting murderers a...