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Books

Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: War and Peace

January 14, 2010

I love long books by good writers.  I love being invested in something long and complicated and ultimately rewarding.  In fact, when I’m reading something I enjoy and it ends at less than four hundred pages, I feel a little cheated.  This, however, is only true of novels.  I hate long movies.  I’m one of [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Hell’s Angels

January 12, 2010

Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, despite its title, is not a book about the Hell’s Angels group.  It’s a book about the difference between perception and reality, and the Angels are merely the conduit through which Thompson explores the dichotomy, conducting a systematic exploration of the misconceptions 1960s America had about the Angels, motorcycles, and the [...]

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Black Beard Reviews the Best of the Naughts: Ha Jin

January 7, 2010

I’m what I like to call a petty genius: I exhibit the idiosyncrasies of a great mind, without, as of yet, a brilliant body of work to justify the unqualified title. It is said that Einstein functioned on such a different mental level that he had difficulty with simple mathematics. Well, I crank out 2,000 [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books He Doesn’t Want to Read: The Road

December 31, 2009

Is it wrong of me to pass judgment on a book that I haven’t read?  No, I say, on the authority of Malcolm Gladwell—who argues in Blink that a quick first impression is often correct—that I am justified in thinking myself enough of a littérateur to know before I reach the end of the first [...]

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Black Beard Abuses His Position by Posting a Politically Slanted Opinion Piece Presented as a Book Review: The Jungle

December 27, 2009

Seventeen cents in 1906 is equivalent to $4.02 in 2009. Aside from the intrinsic desire I have to present you with superfluous information, why I am telling you this?  Answer: seventeen cents is the amount Jurgis Rudkus—the focal character of The Jungle, which Upton Sinclair published in 1906—is paid per hour to work in a [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: American Pastoral

December 24, 2009

I like to buy books for people as gifts.  I do this with the awareness that most of the books I purchase will never be finished and most likely not even begun.  I don’t know what it is about me—whether buying books or writing in this space—that instills me with the compulsion to thrust things [...]

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Black Beard’s Review of Books No One Wants to Read: Ulyssses

December 22, 2009

I’ve been reading Ulysses again recently.  As part of the applications I’m submitting to PhD programs in English Literature this winter, I have to produce a sample of scholarly material to demonstrate my analytical ability.  Writing about Ulysses was a safe choice for me because you rarely meet anyone, even in academia, who has studied [...]

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