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All articles by Andrew Cotlov
16 January 2010
Not surprisingly, the most obvious theme running through David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers is conflict, however; it’s not the obvious conflict of the Iraq War as a whole. Instead, Finkel focuses on the internal conflict within the soldiers fighting the war on the ground and on the Iraqi citizens of Rustamiyah trying to find their footing in a world turned upside down by war.
Rather than focusing...
02 August 2009
If one thing can be gleaned from Tom Folsom’s The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld, it’s that they certainly didn’t call Joe Gallo “Crazy Joe” for nothing. In many ways, he was a textbook example of a juvenile delinquent turned complete sociopath. Crazy Joe robbed, killed, extorted, and racketeered; however, he and his brothers, Larry and Albert “Kid...
17 July 2009
It’s no secret that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was a great writer. In fact, he is one of the best American Literature has to offer. On the jacket of his new collection of previously unpublished works, Who Is Mark Twain?, the publisher includes a quote from William Faulkner explaining that “Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since...
19 June 2009
Burn This Book, edited by Toni Morrison in collaboration with PEN, is a collection of essays and speeches by writers about “censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves” and could not have been released at a better time. In this day and age, many people around the world take free speech and freedom of the press for granted, however; now, just as in the...
25 May 2009
In 1943 when George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his caustic critique of Stalin’s Russia, the Soviet Union was so popular in the United States and Great Britain that he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel. In fact, the Russians were so strongly associated with the fight against the Nazis that it wasn’t until 1945, when the Second World War was over, that Animal Farm was finally published. After...
20 April 2009
Ralph Ellison always insisted that his classic protest novel Invisible Man was neither a protest novel nor autobiographical. Still, it’s difficult to miss the parallels of the narrator’s and Ellison’s lives, and it’s even more difficult to miss that Invisible Man is clearly a protest novel. The question isn’t whether the book is a protest, rather; it’s what the book is protesting. The story’s...
18 April 2009
The Great Gatsby is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel and is also his most well known novel. It’s a snapshot of an era Fitzgerald coined as the “Jazz Age”, the brief window of the 1920’s between the end of World War I and the great stock market crash of 1929, and in this snapshot Fitzgerald reveals a society obsessed with material wealth while simultaneously devoid of basic morals and good...
01 April 2009
The cover jacket of Horatio Castellanos Moya’s Senselessness poses a question that every one of Moya’s readers ought to ask himself while reading the novella: is its narrator “among the hunted—or is he paranoid? Or is he paranoid and one of the hunted?” This is a question that Moya leaves up to the reader to sort out. The narrator of the story, also the protagonist, is quite a character if...
24 March 2009
1984 is essentially a novel about the dangers of an overarching system of government, and the lengths that a political figure will go to retain power once he has acquired it. The novel follows outer-party member Winston Smith through his secret rebellions against Big Brother and the Ruling Party. Smith works in the Ministry of Truth where he spends his days updating, rewriting, and...