Regifting–or passing along a gift to others–has come a long way since Elaine played the practice for laughs on “Seinfeld.” Surveys have found that more than half of all Americans have engaged in it, and most don’t seem to mind when they’re on the receiving end.
But for years, I resisted the trend. In a recent essay on @Medium, I write about how I made peace with regifting, and not just because of its link to the “green giving” movement, which tries to reduce the environmental impact of holiday and other gifts. I also warn about the risks of regifting books without checking first to see whether they contain notes, inscriptions, or bookmarks.
“Am I crazy? The critics raved about this book, but I hated it.” I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a comment like that.
Are we sometimes gaslit by reviews? Why does it happen? How can you avoid getting burned by book, movie, or TV reviews?
Let me reassure you: You’re not crazy. We all have unique tastes, preferences, and life experiences, and yours may simply differ from those of the reviewers you’ve read.
But critics do sometimes overpraise books for reasons that have nothing to do with dishonesty or trying to gaslight you. I explain what they are at @Medium and offer five ways to avoid getting burned by the reviews when you’re trying to decide what to read or see. My tips include a list of weasel words that may tell you that a critic is pulling punches.
A rich harvest of books about World War II exists in almost every genre of fiction and nonfiction: memoir, history, biography, and more, including Daniel Finkelstein’s just-published Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. But one group of people has had strikingly little attention: the women who enabled the men of Hitler’s inner circle.
James Wyllie offers a partial remedy in Nazi Wives (Macmillan, 2020), a group portrait of women like Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, and Magda Goebbels, the wife of his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Who were these women? What did they know about the atrocities of the men they loved? And why did they stay with them, regardless of their crimes against humanity? My full review of Nazi Wiveshas more on these women, who often exercised a soft power in the Third Reich.
One of the most chilling stories about a dog I’ve ever read involved my neighbor Sonny Brewer’s golden retriever, which snatched off the street in our small town and taken to a shelter that would neither give it back nor tell him what it had done with it.
Sonny eventually got his dog back, but it took a month of detective work, calling vets and clinics, and going door-to-door. He wrote about the experience in his book Cormac: The Tale of a Dog Gone Missing, and it’s one no pet owner should ever face. Here’s my story about his nightmare at @Medium.
More than 60 books have come out on O.J. Simpson’s notorious murder trial, and I’ve reviewed or otherwise read some of the best-known. Yet none has resolved all the questions that linger nearly 30 years after Simpson was acquitted of the murder of ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman.
Chief among those questions is: If O.J. didn’t murder Nicole and Ron, who did kill them?
Yes, O.J.’s DNA was found at the crime scene. But–as some authors have argued–that doesn’t mean he killed them: It just means he was at the crime scene, perhaps as an accomplice or accessory to someone else. And it’s widely agreed that both the prosecution and the defense made errors that added to the confusion.
Will be ever have satisfying answers to the questions that linger? I sort through all the conflicting claims and counterclaims in my Medium story, “Why the O.J. Simpson Trial Still Haunts Me.”
Rudyard Kipling was the first English-language winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a writer admired in his day not just by ordinary readers but by literary titans like T.S. Eliot. He’s still beloved by readers worldwide for his poem “If” and for the children’s stories in his The Jungle Book.
But Kipling came of age when the British Empire was in full flower, and his support for it caused his popularity to dwindle in recent decades. Is this fair? I weigh the evidence for and against his work in a post @Medium that focuses on his great short story, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and its animated version by Chuck Jones.
Should we cancel Kipling? Here’s my argument for why we shouldn’t.
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So much recent news about books has been bad — from the spike in banned books at libraries to threat to authors posed by AI — I decided to cheer myself up by writing “5 Publishing Trends Worth Celebrating” at @Medium.
Watch a news report on almost any TV network and before long you’re likely to hear someone say “Take a listen” and cut to a video.
This windy phrase seems to have begun its rapid spread at cable news shows that had more air time to fill than the 30-minute nightly broadcasts on older media.
But it’s long since infected politics, business, and other fields. It’s annoying enough to have an entry in Robert Hartwell Fiske’s The Dimwit’s Dictionary: More than 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases andAlternatives to Them: 2d Edition (Marion Street Press, 2006).
Fiske calls “Take a listen” (or “Have a listen”) an “infantile” expression: “As inane as it is insulting, have (take) a listen obviously says nothing that listen alone does not.” And it’s not the only pointless and baggy phrase you hear regularly.
Do expressions like that irritate you, too? You might enjoy my column about them @Medium.
Harvey Weinstein was Hollywood’s apex predator, the man at the top of a food chain that sparked the #MeToomovement. He ate young women alive, figuratively speaking: actresses, employees, and others unlucky enough to cross his path during his long career as a producer and studio head.
All of it caught up with him after Ronan Farrow and other investigative reporters exposed an open secret in the film industry: Weinstein was a serial sex offender who had been buying off his accusers and silencing them with non-disclosure agreements.
He has spent the past three years in prisons in New York and California after trials in both states led to sentences of a combined 39 years for crimes including rape, sexual assault, and “forced oral copulation.” Weinstein pleaded not guilty to all charges and is appealing his convictions.
How did reporters–and the courageous women who spoke to them–end a decades long sex-crimes spree? Farrow explains how in a book that’s a tale of two scandals: one in the film industry and the other in broadcast journalism.
Farrow was working as a freelance correspondent for NBC when he uncovered deep and persuasive evidence that that Weinstein repeatedly had sexually assaulted women in a long career that included producing such films as “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love.”
But the network sat on the story for so long that the journalist came to believe it was protecting Weinstein–and perhaps one of its own stars.
Farrow took his reporting to the New Yorker, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for this work, shared with the two New York Times reporters who were the first to break the story of his Weinstein’s sexual misconduct.
But Catch and Kill is more than an stellar example of a venerable journalistic genre: the story-behind-the-story tale. Through page after page of stories by stars like the actress Rose McGowan, he shows why we needed the #MeToo movement. Here’s my full review of the book.
Why do critics fault writers for “expository” dialogue in novels and short stories? Is always bad? And how can you avoid it in your writing or spot it in a book you’re reading?
Short answer: “Expository” (or “expositional”) dialogue often leads to stilted or awkward info dumps. Here’s the longer answer:
One-Minute Book Reviews 