Skip to Content
- ON THE COVER »
- Summer Books Issue
- Reviews of 15 summer books including biographies of Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; new Texas novels by Barbara Renaud Gonzalez, Jay Brandon and Emily Fox Gordon; and fresh works on Iran, the American women's movement and progressivism.
Please note: With this issue the Observer takes its annual summer hiatus. We'll be back with a new issue Aug. 7.
- Features
- FEATURE »
- “How’d You Turn A Billion Steers Into Buildings Made of Mirrors?”
- by Mary Helen Specht
- I was on a farmer’s schedule: down with the dark, up with the dawn. Each morning the sunrise bored through the kitchen window by the cupboards as I boiled water for tea and old-fashioned oatmeal. Sometimes there would be a few deer on the outskirts of the yard munching the corn …
READ MORE »
- FEATURE »
- The Man From Bountiful
- by Robert Leleux
- On a late afternoon in early May, the leading lights of the New York theater community gathered at Lincoln Center to pay tribute to Horton Foote, the late playwright from Wharton who died March 4. With a critical reputation as the American Chekhov, Foote was the recipient of two Academy Awards, …
READ MORE »
- Departments
- DIALOGUE »
- Letters to the Editors
- EDITORIAL »
- Writing into the Sunset
- by Brad Tyer
- There I was, sweating midnight puddles in a nylon tent at the Enchanted Rock campground, convincing myself that if I survived the swelter and the pre-sunrise walk to the summit I’d come for, I would drive into Fredericksburg and see if Berkman Books was open on the Fourth of July. If …
READ MORE »
- Books & the Culture
- REVIEW »
- San Antonio Days
- by Char Miller
- The hotel-balcony striptease is a not uncommon occurrence along San Antonio’s fabled Riverwalk. Friends with lofts overlooking the seductive tree-lined waterway report disrobed amblings out into the upper-story sun and passionate embraces leading to the rapid shedding of clothes and inhibitions in full (frontal) view of observers below. I myself, tilting …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Made in Macondo
- by Liliana Valenzuela
- Perhaps no novel is more closely associated with Latin America in the 20th century than One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. Writer and book have become almost synonymous. The author once hailed as “the New Cervantes” and his best-selling work put Latin America on the world-literature map and …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- The Fighting Owls
- by Steven G. Kellman
- Though the opening scene of Emily Fox Gordon’s debut novel is set in Nirvana, its protagonist has attained nothing like serenity. Nirvana is the graduate-student bar where 56-year-old Ruth Blau sits tippling and pondering the banality of her existence at the university where her husband Ben chairs the philosophy department. “This …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Departures & Arrivals
- by Stephanie Elizondo Griest
- The question is posed innocently enough:
“¿Como cruzaste, Mami?”
“How did you cross the border, mommy?”
Yet 60-year-old Amada evades it, heating gorditas and swiveling her hips to a love tune. Why can’t her daughter, Lucero, probe her for chisme? She’d be happy to divulge …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Whose Women’s Movement
- by Carrie Fountain
- What if a woman / is not the moon or the sea?” asks the plaintive speaker in Katha Pollitt’s poem “Metaphors of Women.” This brief but hefty lyric, from the 1981 collection Antarctic Traveller by the poet-turned-journalist and Nation columnist, voices fatigued frustration with the symbols that often stand in for, …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- It Is the Heat
- by James E. McWilliams
- About two million years ago our ape-ish ancestors experienced a number of rapid physical changes: rib cages shrank, pelvises narrowed, teeth became smaller, stomachs constricted, swinging ability declined and cranial cavities almost doubled. These alterations were by no means haphazard. They collectively drove an evolutionary shift from apelike Habilines to Homo …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- The Sporting Lie
- by Dan Oko
- In February, for the first time in years, Lance Armstrong admitted a kind of defeat.
The legendary cyclist, who returned to the Tour de France this summer after a three-year retirement, scrapped much-ballyhooed plans to run his own blood-doping tests, an unprecedented program designed to show that he is …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Bill of Goods
- by Thomas Korosec
- Shady dealings and duplicity at a Fort Worth jewelry superstore form the central premise of How To Sell, the debut novel by former Dallas merchant Clancy Martin. The art of the deal, or rather the hustle, makes up the better-crafted stretches of this coming-of-age story, one informed by the author’s experience …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Our Own Good
- by Tom Palaima
- In the early 1970s, Rick Shenkman recalls, he “was tutored in the precepts of Russell Kirk, Leo Strauss and other conservative intellectuals who were openly hostile to the direction of American democracy” in a seminar sponsored by the right-wing Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The pessimism of conservative thought appealed to him, and …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Bush is from Mars; Jihadists are from Venus
- by Josh Rosenblatt
- If you want to know where the United States went wrong in its approach to the War on Terror, look no further than the day George W. Bush told the world there was going to be a war on terror. You can forget our pre-emptive war against Iraq or our blasé …
READ MORE »
- REVIEW »
- Iran: Inside Out
- by Azita Osanloo
- Books about Iran have been recently proliferating. The last year in particular has delivered three notable titles: Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollah Begs to Differ (November 2008), Azar Nafisi’s Things I’ve Been Silent About: Memories (December 2008) and Azadeh Moaveni’s Honeymoon in Tehran (February 2009). In recent decades, the Western understanding of …
READ MORE »
- DATELINE »
- Lost in the Reads
- by Ruth Pennebaker
- You get rid of ... your books?” one of my younger friends asked.
She looked aghast—as if I’d just announced that I ate my young or drove a Hummer.
“I would never, ever give away a book,” she announced. “I keep every one of them.”
…
READ MORE »
Skip to Main Navigation
