newcritics

Against the background of the ongoing hand wringing over bottled versus tap, I fell headlong into Kevin Bone’s Water-Works – The Architecture and Engineering of the New York City Water Supply (The Monacelli Press, 2006), a handsome volume I had purchased for my father – the retired mechanical engineer – last Christmas. Wading through 150 [...]

I had my Oscar acceptance speech all ready. It was gonna be a beaut…funny, touching …something that would appeal to both the heads and hearts of my adoring public. Then I read the review in the Boston Globe, which called The Kiss the worst film of the 2003 Boston Film Festival. The critic in Beantown’s [...]

I’ve been hooked on the Gasoline Alley comic strip since I was a kid, probably because it was one of the cartoons that my dad used to read to me out of the Daily News when I sat on his lap. Today, sadly, I read it mostly out of habit…only mildly amusing on its best [...]

Nobody talks much about James Thurber, anymore. I wonder why that is. When you look back at most of the great short-form literary humorists of the early/mid 20th century – from S. J. Perelman to Woody Allen – their stuff is almost impossible to read now. I remember laughing out loud when I first read [...]