Reviews

When Casey Fielder, manager of the local O’Ruddy’s restaurant, allows a fight between the privileged St. Brendan’s kids and those from the public high school to escalate, his inaction puts him at risk of being charged with negligence. As a result of the fight, Colin Chase has suffered brain damage. Shawver alternates between Casey and Colin’s mother Lea as they both investigate the circumstances behind the fight. Casey has been fired and in exploring the reasons for the fight hopes to find absolution for his inaction.

This memoir would be overwhelmingly sad for me, had I not already read Old School by the same author and know that he becomes a successful author and teacher of literature at Stanford. But if you didn’t know that this child redeems himself in the end, this would be sad, a sad tale indeed.

In the four short stories contained in A Contract With God, Eisner examines life in the 1930’s Bronx tenements that sprung up in New York after WWI. These neighborhoods accommodated the influx of immigrants and bred a close neighborliness ripe for mining stories. Eisner does this brilliantly.

For those readers familiar with Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich offers a different type book here. Rather than inserting herself into a typical working-class existence, through a series of essays she examines the current state of America and what it means for the average American. From corporate irresponsibility to prisoner abuse, Ehrenreich intensely scrutinizes the duplicity of American politics and culture. Much of what she has to say, in my humble opinion, is right on target.

After her release from prison for tax evasion, Emma Sutton, obviously modeled after Martha Stewart, finds herself disenchanted with the empire she had build from the ground up. The turning point comes at an auction, where Emma, in a moment of egotistical, cut-throat maneuvering purchases a table out from under a fellow bidder.

When two rough young ranch hands end up on Brokeback Mountain for a summer herding sheep together, they form a bond so strong that it holds across the years. Despite marriages with children, physical distance, and intolerance in the ranching community, they manage to sustain their affair until one falls victim to the hatred he had chosen to ignore.