newcritics

The action films of the 1970s shot in and around New York embrace a curb-level realism - an obsession with gritty locations - that no studio or backlot can possibly reproduce. The storefronts, dented cars, barren parks and filigreed subway els dress movies like The Seven-Ups, The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3, and the French [...]

The best book ever written about the scourge of drugs and the racial chasm in the deep interior of Brooklyn was Greg Donaldson’s gritty 1994 true life new journalism book, The Ville. It covered the lives of two men - one a Housing cop and the other a gang member - along with a vast [...]

I believe we must treat our political foes with respect in the arena of public opinion. And so I will dedicate this post to the Governor of Alaska. This is Banned Books Week, and it’s always appropriate to look at what drives literary censorship in this country. According to the American Library Association, more than [...]

For many years now, curmudgeon-blogger-painter-author James Howard Kunstler has been predicting the downfall of America’s vast consumer society in stark terms, in his non-fiction books (like his 2006 The Long Emergency) and on his iconic blog, Clusterfuck Nation. Read Kunstler for a couple of weeks, and he will piss you off. Read him for [...]

Little, Brown missed the mark in subtitling Joe Nick Patoski’s absorbing new biography of Willie Nelson ‘An Epic Life’.
Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American [...]