Review by Mack Hassler “A doctor gave his patient six months to live, but he couldn’t pay his bill, so he gave him another six months.” — Henny Youngman, comic (1906-1998) Recent Yooper writers of humor that I have reviewed may or may not know Henny Youngman’s one-liners, but I…
Review by Mack Hassler “Mark Twain’s Huck Finn underlies all American Literature” Character of Hemingway in Midnight in Paris (2011) by Woody Allen When he writes, produces, and directs film, Woody Allen can be brilliant. In the epigraph above, he captures an idea about Hemingway often found in scholarly work. …
Review by Mack Hassler “…the novel is a reflection upon its own nature” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963 Usually in good fiction there is an autobiographical impulse that may be seen in the mode of storytelling. In his later novels and stories, the great Romantic master of the…
Review by Mack Hassler “Therefore the land mourns… Together with the wild animals” Hosea 4:3 This first novel by Hinman has captured my interest so completely that I do not want to stop reading. Her editor at Superior Book Productions is Tyler Tichelaar, well-known for his own many books. In…
Review by Mack Hassler “It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world” — Octavio Paz Booksellers and especially publishers hope that books may be part of commerce. So it seems only fair that commercial books may be reviewed as though…
Review by Mack Hassler “Therefore it was called Babel because there the Lord confused the language of all.” Genesis 11:9 A good scholarly writer is needed, especially when there are multiple voices on a topic. Willa Brown began working on Gentlemen of the Woods for her dissertation at the…
Review by Mack Hassler “…to tell the whole thing, going back to that first grisly night….back even further, in fact, to our days with Professor James at Harvard. Yes, to dredge it all up….” Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994), p. 5 Tichelaar has produced a comprehensive book loaded with…
Review by Mack Hassler “…the novel is reflecting upon its own nature” Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963 Gentle Spirits, this first book-length offering by Conlan, a retired shipmaster and poet, is not exactly an “Anti-Novel” in the tradition that Sartre describes above. It does not use the…
Review by Mack Hassler Mazza recently retired from thirty-one years of teaching in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago and has moved to the Upper Peninsula, so we can now consider her as a Yooper writer. She is a native of Southern California and has…
Review by Mack Hassler Rome Asleep Rome in her nightdress, nothing supporting…. Bridges across the Tiber hold islands in their sleep…. In the morning tourists will return Fresh from hotel showers, packed in buses That hum like arrows around the cars parked On edges of space. (p. 15) In…
Review by Mack Hassler “One Day, about noon, going toward my boat, I was exceedingly surprised, with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore…. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) In To Be Marquette, a fine mystery novel by the young writer Sharon Dilworth, who has three collections…
Review by Mack Hassler “Mixed Genres and True Heritages: From Trollope’s Ralph the Heir to Delany’s Dhalgren,” by D. M. Hassler. in Into Darkness Peering (Greenwood Press, 1997) Most of the nearly thirty titles I have posted at the U.P. Book Review have been single-authored books. This biographical…
Review by Mack Hassler “…so 1984 teaches us, the danger with which all men are confronted today, the danger of a society of automatons who will have lost every trace of individuality, of love…. Erich Fromm, “Afterword to 1984” (1949) I think good writers feel safe when they…
Review by Mack Hassler The Walloon Writers Review annual collection is inspired by Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. The Northern Shore of the UP from East to West is defined by the Big Lake with a small stretch of Lake Huron reaching toward Canada beyond the Bridge. On the…
Review by Mack Hassler “It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world.” Octavio Paz I think Terri Martin is a clever and witty writer who comprehends the dynamic link of language to her world, not only as…
Review by Mack Hassler “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” Matthew 4:19 Do the Right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” Mark Twain, epigraph to Chapter 22 One of the things that interests me about all of literature, reaching back even to…
Review by Mack Hassler “It is a poetry where the world becomes writing and language becomes the double of the world.” Octavio Paz I will blend in this review of Make It Go In the Snow ideas and effects that I have come across in my general reading on surrealism…
Review by Mack Hassler Recently I flew from O’Hare in Chicago to a conference at Moline, Illinois, and got a good look at the empty prairie West of the Windy City—wide open and empty like the UP. Two very big cities full of mob violence and major crime are the…
