“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
Usually it’s the case with true-crime books that the story is compelling, but the writing is crap. This one’s the other way around — a well-written book that is nonetheless some of the least …
Aw. So cute, and so funny! Coco is my favorite, with her teeeeeeny little tiara. (3/29/04)
Mary Wells Lawrence is so full of herself that it’s a wonder she hasn’t exploded, and the prose is the kind of forced-dizzy hostessy gushing I ordinarily hate, but it works — it’s a fast, …
I don’t like Lupica’s writing, but he selected great stories for this collection. The Rayna DuBose article is enormously affecting. (1/20/06)
An excellent overview; if you like higher-end true-crime writing, I highly recommend it. (10/29/03)
For a collection of this type, a lot of the writing is flat, and the essay on the ’91 Series is overwrought; it’s a strange selection, I think. Mickey Mantle, sure. ’86 postseason, …
Okay, as excellent as some of the inside scoop is — and you really can’t beat Calvin Schiraldi bitching, almost twenty years after that fateful World Series, “Gary Carter can suck my ass” — the …
The first Lemony Snicket. It’s a good, fast read, but I don’t know if I’ll bother with the others. I love Sunny, though. (4/26/04)
I wanted to like this more than I did. The writing is good; it’s not uninteresting, it’s not slow anywhere, it’s not a prose problem. It’s a relatability problem, not because I grew …
Good for true-crime junkies, without as much of the self-promotion Douglas tends to indulge in elsewhere — with the exception of The Cases That Haunt Us, which I highly recommend, I’ve found his other books …