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DAILY SHVITZ
Weekend Book Roundup
by Avi Kramer, July 29, 2007
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  • The year's best picture books, including this photo from "A Celebration of Black Fatherhood," by Carol Ross. [The Washington Post]

  • Peter Schjeldahl reviews "The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture," by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. [The New Yorker]

  • In "AK47: The Story of the People's Gun," Michael Hodges traces the history of the "Coca-Cola of firearms" from the adolescence of Mikhail Kalashnikov to the Peole's Liberation Front in Vietnam. The review reads, "The book works thanks to some spectacular reportage and because its author traces, without glorification, how the appliance of science kills human beings, building the narrative around people like those kids in sub-Saharan Africa where the AK 'moved from being a tool of the conflict to the cause of the conflict.'" [The Guardian]

  • An economist leaves western Pennsylvania and road trips it with his wife around the U.S.A. But instead of just passing through the Middle of Nowhere, they stop, stay and take jobs like desk clerk and waitress. The result: Michael Yates's "Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue." [Z Magazine]

  • The poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, one of the most important figures in postwar Polish literature. [The New York Times]

  • Ron Currie Jr. quotes Nietzsche for the title and sets his collection of stories, "God is Dead," in Darfur. [The San Francisco Chronicle]



Avi is a fiction writer living in Boston.


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