Wael Ghonim/Photo: Sam Christmas

By Ella Christoph

A year ago, days into the protest in Tahrir Square, news stories breathlessly proclaimed the importance of social media in the massive participation of Egyptian youth in a revolution few saw coming. Facebook pages, Tweeting—all of a sudden they were validated, by a monumental, real-world event. But as the protests raged on, Americans knew few of the details of how, exactly, all this social media was mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people living under oppressive regimes.

And neither Egyptians nor the rest of the world knew the name, or the face, behind a Facebook page that was pivotal in catalyzing the protests. Who was the anonymous “Admin” behind the Facebook page “I am Khaled Said”—the page that first suggested, and then coordinated, the momentous January 25th protests? Read the rest of this entry »

By Ella Christoph

Any woman could tell you how much easier it is to pick up guys—well, usually, let them pick you up—than it is to befriend a girl. Obviously, bars aren’t a good spot for searching out new best buds. But—maybe more than women wish to admit, or guys might believe—even places that seem almost overflowing with potential besties can end up feeling like friend deserts.

Childhood friends who lived on your street now live halfway around the country; college roommates stayed and you moved, or vice versa. Work, bars and the gym aren’t breeding grounds for best-friendships the same way recess, camp and drunken walks home from frat parties were earlier in life. But few women talk about the challenges of making friends in the adult world, worried they’ll be seen as losers, or unappreciative of the friends or significant other they already have. Never mind that it’s fine to talk incessantly about the lengths you’re going to in order to hunt down The One. Read the rest of this entry »

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Patti Smith has garnered plenty of critical acclaim over the past year for “Just Kids,” a memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, but she also quietly published another slender remembrance—”Woolgathering.”

At less than one-hundred pages, with Smith’s own photographs interspersed like religious relics, “Woolgathering” reads like a path through a dream, or the remembrances of a priestess. But Smith claims, in a charming introduction, that it’s truth, not fairy tale. She also endearingly writes that she hopes the book will impose a “vague and curious joy” on the reader, which is a fairly accurate way to describe how the book is absorbed. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Martin Northway

Though the title of Jeanne Darst’s memoir “Fiction Ruined My Family” suggests a chilling indictment of the human cost of art, it could well be subtitled “But I Became a Writer Anyway.”

Whether it is genetics or nurture or both that made her this way, Darst is clearly a natural—a Gen X’er who though failing in every other way has finally succeeded as an artist, here with a book that is both a rant against and an anthem to the making of literature, turning on a dime from hysterical, often ribald humor to unvarnished, painful and sober (literally) reality.

Darst, a third-generation writer on her father’s side, has a nuclear family rooted in two old St. Louis lines—her father’s politically savvy Irish clan that includes a former mayor and her mother’s financially successful Gissys, who are country club and horse people. (Darst’s mother was a champion equestrian in her youth as well as a high-achieving collegian.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Beth Alvarado, who received an MFA from the University of Arizona, where she now teaches, grew up in America’s surreal midcentury West and Southwest—Oahu, San Diego, Tucson, Seattle, Grand Junction—where privileged white adventurers in search of modernity, a new wealth and the sun accidentally bumped sunburnt shoulders with migrant workers and poor people of all colors in search of just enough to get by.

“A swimming pool in the backyard, blue and unwavering. My father drinks too much whiskey. My mother’s heels click across the cold tile floors, telegraphing her displeasure.” Alvarado is eighteen, it is 1972, they live in Tuscon. Inevitably, perhaps, she becomes a hippie, she does drugs, she falls in love with a Mexican man. Read the rest of this entry »

Joan Didion has long been the most glamorous writer in America. Her attitude–skeptical, curious, singular, and cool–hangs on her simple, angular sentences like a Chanel coat. It does not ruffle. But in the early 2000s, Didion became glamorous for another reason: her suffering. In 2003, her husband of almost four decades, John Gregory Dunne, died of a heart attack, shortly after their daughter, Quintana Roo, had entered the hospital in septic shock. “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion’s profoundly moving memoir of this time, won the National Book Award. It became the book one gave a friend blind-sided by loss. Read the rest of this entry »

What promises to be an interesting merger of critical theory, popular biography and memoir turns out to be little more than an expression of un-self-conscious, occasionally creepy fandom in Lila Azam Zanganeh’s “The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness”—a debut that feels three times as long as its 189 pages.

Nabokov—one of the most towering figures of twentieth-century literature—wrote profoundly complex, wildly smart novels. They were packed with human characters, treated by their creator humanely. In classics like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” he wove deeply felt stories into the complicated lattice of his structures and systems. And did so with an obsessive attention to detail, the kind that can only be achieved through a deep love of one’s craft.

It’s that love—of writing, of life—that Zanganeh sets out to document in her book. Unfortunately, she spends more time saying things like this: “Some days earlier, I had, in fact, had a dream. He was there. So close I could almost touch him.” Or this: “As I again sit at my desk, I realize that, for a while now, I’ve been ignoring a slight swerving. Like the onset of something; a mild vertigo, not altogether unpleasant.” Or, most cringe-inducing, this: “You’re about to begin the twelfth chapter of ‘The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness.’ Contentedly, you stack two pillows behind your head, curl up in your quilt and switch off the TV.” Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s been twenty-one years since Oscar Hijuelos became the first Latino recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and if his new memoir, “Thoughts Without Cigarettes,” is any indication, he still has issues with owning that distinction. Hijuelos’ story begins in Manhattan, in Morningside Heights, where his parents settled after leaving a pre-Castro Cuba, and where young Oscarito and his brother cut their teeth in a neighborhood that sounds a lot like Humboldt Park, rife with whities, Latinos and the occasional junkie thug. When he contracts nephritis, a kidney disease, as a young boy on his first visit to Cuba, Hijuelos’ childhood takes a turn that ultimately throws his whole identity into a spiral; he loses the ability to speak Spanish. His brain creates a link between his long, isolated hospital stay and the simple fact that he caught the illness in Cuba, and though he retains the ability to comprehend Spanish, he never speaks it with the aplomb of his family, or neighbors, or even his schoolmates in Spanish class. This, combined with his blond hair and fair complexion (owing to his Castilian heritage), makes for an identity struggle that dominates the pages of Hijuelos’ memoir. Read the rest of this entry »

By Martin Northway

Write about what you know: It is both what Professor X preaches to his students of college English and composition, and what he practices in his new memoir based on a noteworthy essay in the Atlantic. And writing about what he knows is both the strength and weakness of “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.”

Based on his reports from teaching as an adjunct instructor in both a pseudonymous small college and a junior college somewhere in middle America, he makes a convincing case that higher education is not for everyone. In fact, one begins to wonder if it really is for almost anyone he has to teach, where his role, largely, has been trying to repair woefully students’ inadequate preparation in written English at the secondary—and even lower—levels of education.

The author cites the great failure rates of entering college and junior-college students, at the same time—whether they graduate or not, they saddle themselves with heavy debts they may not be able to repay. Meanwhile, businesses and institutions raise the educational-credential requirements for their employees, and politicians—including the President of the United States—stump the country arguing that any American who wants a college education should be able to get one.

Sadly, as a society we are not examining the fitness or the adequacy of college education to specific opportunities. Professor X argues that not only is higher education not for everyone, our wasteful system may actually be inflicting damage on individuals who are not prepared to meet its challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

By Hugh Iglarsh

“Welcome to Colored School,” says the back cover of “Black Cracker,” Josh Alan Friedman’s account of his strange, split childhood. In the early 1960s, Friedman—the son of noted humorist Bruce Jay Friedman—attended South School in Glen Cove, New York, as pretty much the only white kid in “the last segregated colored school on Long Island.” From first through fourth grades, Friedman would leave his comfortable suburban home in the morning and spend his days in an ancient schoolhouse, located hard by the Third World-style shantytown that contained Glen Cove’s African-American population. It was an impoverished neighborhood “that could have been transplanted from the Carolinas,” long since razed and replaced by public housing.

The book is Friedman’s search for “my old Black self, the inner nigger of my youth.” His choice of language and title is revealing, suggesting the ongoing conflict—not to say warfare—between the two sides of his identity. In addition, Friedman is a Jew, characterized by one of the local greasers as “nothin’ but a nigger turned inside out.”

No wonder the very young Josh Friedman pictured on the cover has such a deer-in-the-headlights look to him.

I had a chance to converse with the grown-up Friedman recently. He came to Chicago to attend the annual birthday party of his hero, the late local novelist Nelson Algren, who had spent a week with Friedman’s family in the mid-sixties. “My dad said, a great writer is coming to stay with us,” recalls Friedman of the long-ago visit. He remembers a scruffy, middle-aged man who got up early every morning to chat with the housekeeper.

“My parents were crazy about him,” says Friedman. “They threw a wild party in his honor on Fire Island that resulted in about ten divorces. I woke up to a half-naked woman in my room. Nelson thought it was too much—he said, ‘why do people have to be like that?’” Read the rest of this entry »