Readers may feel themselves responding as her college acquaintances did: “my problems and I were a burden. ‘You’re too...
Journalist and erstwhile YA author Hale offers six previously published essays gathered in an apparent attempt to prove the collection’s title.
The title springs from events described in a 2014 Guardian piece called “Am I Being Catfished?” that made news in literary circles, when the author became so obsessed with a negative Goodreads review of her first YA book, No One Else Can Have You (2013), that she burrowed into the reviewer’s online identity and physically tracked her down to confront her. Slightly reworked as “Catfish,” that essay leads off this collection. In the others, Hale recounts a hunting trip to Okeechobee in which she “stabbed the shit out of” a female feral hog and a separate series of futile efforts to track down and kill a mountain lion in Hollywood’s Griffith Park; one reporting trip to the Miss America pageant and another to Snowflake, Arizona, to profile a community of people suffering from “environmental illness”; and, most poignantly, the rape she endured at a sketchy massage parlor on the same day she moved into her freshman dorm at Harvard, an event that warped her college years and, by implication, perhaps her adult life. Hale weaves references to her own mental illness throughout the collection, describing how, after the publication of “Am I Being Catfished?” “I went bananas. I lost my mind,” took a knife to her wrists, and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. For all her seeming forthcomingness, however, the author rarely gives readers anything other than what feels like an intentionally curated sense of Kathleen Hale, crazy stalker. The essays don’t work as well together thematically as she perhaps hopes they do, an effect intensified by her caginess as to the timeline of both events recounted and the essays’ original publication dates.
Readers may feel themselves responding as her college acquaintances did: “my problems and I were a burden. ‘You’re too much,’ they said. And they were right; I was impossible.”Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2909-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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