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Corruption, Greed in the Roaring ‘20s Set the Tone for ‘Truth to Power’

Rebekah Frank

The roaring Twenties, organized crime, crooked politicians, the assault on the newspaper industry by big money, sex, love, romance; Truth to Power by J.S. Matlin has it all.  Only it still manages to fall flat.  The book, broken into three subsections, begins in 1924 with the central character, David Driscoll, pulling into a town called St. Luke in the American Midwest.  Humiliated by the discovery of his dalliance with the editor-in-chief’s wife and an unethical arrangement with an advertiser, he is sent packing from his first job at The St. Louis Star to a smalltown newspaper called The St. Luke Bugle.

Literary Flashback: Reading ‘Super Sad True Love Story’

Kimberly Tolleson

Proving that a dystopia can still be a fun read, Gary Shteyngart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story is set in the not-too-distant future of New York City, providing many parallels that hit disturbingly close to home. Our hero Lenny Abramov, a nerdy and overzealous 39-year-old, is a relic of the recent past: He loves reading bound books; his body, nose and hairline are not perfect; but most of all, he is striving for some authentic human connection in a world of self-absorption. 

Carlos Fuentes’ Intellectual Vision of Democracy Looms Over Mexico After the Author’s Death

Louis Nevaer

The sudden death of Carlos Fuentes (1928 – 2012), Mexican novelist, social critic and man of letters, this week at the age of 83, has cast a shadow over the nation just weeks before voters here will go to the polls to elect new leaders, including the president, in national elections. Often overlooked is the fact that Carlos Fuentes played a key role in Mexico’s transition from a one-party state to a democratic one. Perhaps more than any other single Mexican, Fuentes worked to lay the intellectual foundation for Mexico becoming a functioning democracy. 

From Wall St. to the South Pacific: How Stephen Jermanok Embarked on a Life of Travel

Tara Taghizadeh

Not long ago, the art of exploration and travel writing seemed to be the exclusive right of the British. However, not to be outdone by their brethren across the Atlantic, a number of prominent American travel writers – from the late, great Mark Twain and Richard Halliburton to Paul Theroux – began to populate the field and have continuously made an impressive mark for themselves on the literary travel map. Amongst the prolific American set is Stephen Jermanok, who came to the world of travel after quitting his job as a broker in Manhattan.

Hadden Memoir Serves as Timely Reminder of Worlds South of the Border

Lee Polevoi

Yet another looming casualty of the Information Age is the iconic roving foreign correspondent.  These days, when any clown with a cell phone can capture footage of streets riots in Cairo and Tripoli,  the events themselves—often stripped of all context—become just the latest media blips in a never-ending parade of near-meaningless “news stories.”  In Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti, ex-National Public Radio correspondent Gerry Hadden offers a welcome corrective to this trend, as well as a reminder that turbulence in these regions is nothing new. 

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