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The Long Shadow of The Yellow House
It’s hard to say, even 370 pages later, what the yellow house means to Sarah Broom. As a substantial structure about which to tell a story of a place, it’s not much to look at—a shotgun house in New Orleans East, ultimately ravaged by Katrina and razed to the ground. For most of the second →
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Saying Goodbye to Twitter Me: A Review of The Problem with Everything
For me, it happens when I go to the Twitter feed after some recent ‘problematic’ event or statement has hit the news. Immediately the folks I have chosen to follow, ‘influencers’ among them, stoke the little fires of irritation I might have felt and before long lure me into the Twitter-sanctioned indignation I should be →
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DAVID BENTLEY HART FINDS A WAY OUT OF HELL
David Bentley Hart’s book about hell, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, is brief, which is appropriate since hell is not something a Christian believes in, strictly speaking. Belief, in the creeds, is reserved for real things like a God who creates from nothing, a Christ who dies for the forgiveness of →
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Top 10 Posts of 2019
It’s been another good year for this Heartlands site. The number of views has almost doubled and we have had a number of good connections with and reviews from other sites. Below you’ll find the Top 10 posts from the year along with some other notable posts in the realms of books, interviews, and poetry. →
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#1 (& a Recap): The Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Suzannah Lessard’s The Absent Hand: Reimagining Our American Landscape is the perfect Heartlands read. In this collection of essays, the veteran writer and observer lays bare what we have done to the land in the shift to the digital age. Lessard’s writing is beautiful and her thesis is strong–whereas the created landscapes we live in have →
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#2–Heavy: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Kiese Laymon’s 2018 memoir, Heavy, made many best book lists last year. I got to it this year, partly because I understood that it was about Laymon’s struggles with his weight. It’s about a lot more than that. And Laymon’s struggles as a young, African-American man growing up in Mississippi are different than mine. With sparkling →
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#3–Salvage the Bones: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
This is where making this list gets hard. Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, was, by far the best book I read this year. It is way too reductive to call this a Katrina novel, even though the 2005 hurricane broods over the whole story. It is a book about family, mothers, violence, →
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#5–A Shout in the Ruins: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
Kevin Powers’ historical novel, A Shout in the Ruins, had me from the first paragraph. It’s not just that he told a gripping and heart-filled novel of my home state, Virginia, in the Civil War and mid-20th century eras. It’s also that Powers is an elemental writer who uses words to explosive effect, touching on the →
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#6–Elmet: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
We’re halfway through the best reads of the year. We’ve had poetry, history, and an African adventure tale. How about a mythic journey into the Yorkshire woods? Fiona Mozley’s debut novel, Elmet, is the story of a wild man, his vulnerable son, and his ferocious daughter. It is also one of the best pure stories I →
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#7–The War Before the War: Heartlands Best Reads of 2019
A second history book makes the list in the #7 spot of our annual countdown of Best Reads. Anthony Delbanco, The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War, focuses on a potent symbol of antebellum America, the fugitive slave, and shows how the unspooling →
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