Way back in the late 1800s, the first automobiles rolled down the dirt roads. The age of the combustion engine that took us places was born. If we knew now what we didn’t know then, would we have proceeded to build the highways and byways of the rough beast? At first, there were just byways,…
‘Swan Song’ by Robert R. McCammon: A Book Review
Inside her mind was the beauty of the world—what was left of it, that is. Everything had changed. The giant cornfields broke open, and missiles flew out of the ground. Submarines all over the ocean fired nuclear warheads, and not a country was untouched. Robert R McCammon has achieved his masterpiece in the story of…
Insane Clown President: Matt Taibbi on Social Justice in the Age of Donald Trump
Spare Change News was able to track down busy journalist and author Matt Taibbi to talk about President Trump’s potential impact on social justice, healthcare and homelessness. Taibbi also spoke about his new book, released in January, titled “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus”, which gathers his reporting for Rolling Stone during the…
Revolutionary Reads: Boston bookstores rally readers with political displays and collections
Photo: Brookline Booksmith After U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway referenced the nonexistent “Bowling Green Massacre” in defending President Trump’s executive order banning refugees and immigrants from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the United States, Harvard Book Store staffers fired back with a cheeky display commemorating the “victims” of the incident. Titles on the…
“Norse Mythology” by Neil Gaiman: A Book Review
Neil Gaiman respects the old gods, and that’s why he’s the proper man to write their tales. Gaiman did not just read tales that modern men have written to decipher the old god’s realities. He went back and studied the original translations of Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda and the verses of the Poetic Edda, which…
“Darktown” by Thomas Mullen: A Book Review
Atria Books—An Imprint of Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 “I must tell you, it was not easy for me to raise my right hand and say, ‘I, Willard Strickland, a Negro, do solemnly swear to perform the duties of a Negro policeman’—Officer Willard Strickland, Atlanta Police Department,…
Michael Patrick MacDonald: Families of All Souls “Are all Dealing with Heroin”
(Photo: Bill Brett) When Michael Patrick MacDonald walks down ‘methadone mile’ he sees a familiar story among the addicts and panhandlers. “Most people down there come from places like I come from,” MacDonald said. Places of “poverty” and “trauma.” MacDonald grew up in the Old Colony housing projects during the height of the cocaine epidemic…
Penn State Professor Hopes to Add Voices Through Homeless Narratives
Penn State Professor Joshua D. Phillips opened his latest book, “Homeless: Narratives from the Streets,” with a Mother Teresa quote, “Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.” Phillips’ book, which served as his graduate dissertation from Southern Illinois University, is taken from spending 2012…
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch: A Book Review
Crown Publishers, an Imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. www.crownpublishing.com “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present. Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened.”—T.S. Eliot…
“Underground Airlines” by Ben H. Winters: A Book Review
Mulholland Books/Little Brown & Company, Hachette Book Group; Goldsboro Books, UK Ltd. Edition S & N. Imagine if President Lincoln was shot before the Civil War took place and then, because of that and the greed of humankind, the Civil War never happened. If you were black and born into a slave state, there would…