Review by Zach Sylvester

Spider is settled into the CIty and with pen in hand he begins to stir its murky stew. In these pages he rubs up against a headless child who looks to him as a father and a police dog who looks at him with vengeful aggression. Immerse yourself and go one level deeper into Jerusalem's chaotic dystopia.

Review by Zach Sylvester

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” Open up this comic and forever plaster your skin with the smell of Spider Jerusalem.

Review by Kyle Beckhorn

Very cool book. Looks at families from all around the world, and what they eat and consume (alcohol/cigarettes) in a week. I especially love the very back of the book that has a large table of data/statistics... Including how many McDonnalds are in the country, % of obesity, alcohol and cigarette consumption, average age for male/female, population, population density, and much much more... You can learn how to cook in this book too, because it also includes family recopies from all over the world.

Review by Gavin Ray

This is an amazing story of learning how to be creative. Not only does it uncover the importance in abolishing foreign creative ideas for one's own personal flow, but it also poses some very important questions. Such as, "Can we remember something we can't imagine?" The world seems much more complicated now that I've read this book, but at the same time I feel more freedom in exploring it. Like, maybe we should play.

Review by Kryssanne Adams

This book is beautiful, and brings a vision of a utopian Cascadia to life through the eyes of a stubborn American journalist. Callenbach leaves little to the imagination, covering nearly every aspect of Ecotopian society. This book is fascinating, and every once and a while I find myself really bummed that Ecotopia isn't a real place.

Review by Robert Lashley

TS Eliot's Four Quartets was a drastic departure from the modernism he helped to create and the style that made him one of the most famous poets of the 20th century, away from the nihilist metaphysics immortalized in The Wasteland toward something earthier, more realistic, grounded in the King James Bible of his youth. In four long poems of five parts each, Eliot humanizes his towering voice, turning from the surfeit data of his earlier work to such subjects as nature, time, death and war; the result is some of the most effective, concrete, and moving work that he, or any poet, has ever done. Eliot ended his career as a poet with Four Quartets, one with highs and lows that both his fans and detractors have yet to come to terms with. Taste is always personal, and it is this writer's opinion that his flaws, both as a poet and a thinker, can be explained, but not explained away. He wrote too well, accomplished too much on the page, and meant too much to the language to be thrown away by history. Any case in his defense should begin here. The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tounges declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre - To be redeemed from fire by fire. ~from Little Gidding At the time of their publication, the poems were criticized for their religiosity, sparse symbolism, and abandonment of despair: cardinal sins to a generation of writers still adamant in their lack of faith in humanity. Read today, these complaints miss their mark; it is the religious context of Eliot's language -- the sermonic tenor there in all of his best work, the way he doesn't adapt the tenants of symbolism as much as take them to church -- that gives these poems their beauty. In Burnt Norton and The Dry Salvages Eliot derives his symbols from his religious upbringing and the poems achieve unity through them. Although saddled by the occasional fey oratorical pronouncement, they show that if Eliot stopped being a modernist deity, he didn't necessarily stop being a modernist. It is in his vision-strewn testimonies of London under attack where Eliot's writing soars. Like so many writers of the early 20th century, he believed the vile superstitions of the time regarding Jews, banks, and social credit, and thought that if one was to achieve peace, all three needed to be dealt with. The second world war, and especially Nazi Germany's bombing of his beloved London, snapped him out of those beliefs quickly; East Coker and Little Gidding were his response. In both poems, Eliot is the literary comforter on high, despairing of humanity's slide into war, firm in his belief in civilization, and adamant, in post-apocalyptic tone, that London would delivered through this fire, that " With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling England, and humanity with it, would be saved." Same some time to read this.

Review by Robert Lashley

( note, I wrote a draft of this in future man's account, and now I am putting an edited version under my own. Robert) Rereading Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin's most recognizable work of fiction, I kept going back to a paragraph in Toni Morrison's Eulogy of him; a part of a speech that exists as a work of literature in itself. "You made American English honest - genuinely international. You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogue, representative, humane. You stripped it of ease and false comfort and fake innocence and evasion and hypocrisy. And in place of deviousness was clarity. In place of soft plump lies was a lean, targeted power. In place of intellectual disingenuousness and what you called 'exasperating egocentricity,' you gave us undecorated truth. You replaced lumbering platitudes with an upright elegance. You went into that forbidden territory and decolonized it, 'robbed it of the jewel of its naivete,' and un-gated it for black people so that in your wake we could enter it, occupy it, restructure it in order to accommodate our complicated passion - not our vanities but our intricate, difficult, demanding beauty, our tragic, insistent knowledge, our lived reality, our sleek classical imagination - all the while refusing 'to be defined by a language that has never been able to recognize [us].' In your hands language was handsome again. In your hands we saw how it was meant to be: neither bloodless nor bloody, and yet alive." It is the most eloquent defense ofhis work, and a telling paragraph given his complicated relationship with fiction. In the 70's, Baldwin was in talks to have Morrison as his editor. As both novelist and higher up at random house, Morrison had helped to foster an aesthethic of black fiction focused less with speechifying toward a genererric image of a "white audience" and more about examinining the interior of black life, an aesthtic very much influenced by Mountain, and one that he struggled to come back to as he became more of a public figure in the civil rights movement. Given the strengths and deficencies of the novels he put out in the 70's ,( and the neglect he suffered at his hands of the publishers he actually had), it was a shame that this partership didnt happen. In this case, however, shame must be put in it's bening and proper context, and in the context of the glories of one of the greatest writers in the history of the english language. James Baldwin was a writer whose literary gifts, personal honesty and moral courage shook America to its core and shaped the scope of its history for the better. At his best, his writing was a seductive soup; full of grace, rage, charm, anger, compassion, thoughtfulness, indignation and heart. In his speeches and writings, he touched on countless truths on what it meant to be black in America, articulated deep wounds to a mass audience and kicked down numbers of unopened doors. Even in the realm of prodigious American literary giants, Baldwin casts a shadow. Go Tell It On The Mountain, in this writers opinion, is a vital part of that shadow, and one of the most underrrated classic works of fiction in the history of the 20th century. The consensus that Baldwin's non fiction is bettere than his fiction only has credence if you take into account that he is generally considered one of the five greatest essayist of the twentieth century. In his classic Non fiction books ( Notes Of A Native Son, Nobody knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name In The Street) Baldwin fused the language of the King James bible with that of Henry James' prefaces, and to that, added the rhethorical gravitas of the African American Storefront preacher. The result was a body of work that every person who has struck a grace note in racial dicussions owes a debt to. In those books, Baldwin found the universal in the personal, and demanded every reader repudiate the nightmare of America's racist history and see the humanity of every person regardless of race, creed, gender or sexual preference. Only in contrast to his essays does his fiction seem lacking. Outside of his first novel, his best fiction worked in the first person point of view(Giovanni's Room, Just Above My head) . Baldwin's devotion to Henry James at times worked to the detriment of his novels: the old 19th century scion's belief in style equaling form more often than not came at expense of plot, and Baldwin, for all the beauty of his prose, fell into the same trap; the prime example being Another Country, a novel that is riveting for it's first 100 pages, then drags for it's next 300) Although I urge you to read almost everything the man has written, fiction and non, Baldwin has only one truly brilliant work of fiction. But what a work it is. Mountain is a symphony of the post-great migration black family; an epic detailing their interior lives, their interconnection with their southern past and their ability to survive through tremendous pain. It is also a work of ecumenical ecstasy and pathology, a narrative showing the bind religion has on the scope of African American lives and history, both showing how it helped us survive during our darkest hours and how it almost destroyed us via it's ruthless orthodoxies. Though just over 200 pages, it is also a prose tour-de-force , revolutionizing the American syntactical landscape by bringing together a stunning grasp of English prose with the language, rhythms and cadences of the black church. The story revolves around the Grimes Clan, 5 members of a highly religious black family. There is Gabriel, the father who is a noxious mixture of pallid sanctimony and moral squalor. He married a woman named Elizabeth, who he treats sadistically because she had a son out of wedlock, although he's done the same thing earlier in his life. Elizabeth's "bastard" son John is the main character of the novel, a perceptive, bright and insightful young boy when he is not being Gabriel's punching bag. Gabriel gives more love to Roy, the son he has with Elizabeth, who is more like the childlike thug Loeb to Gabriel's fatherly Leopold. Gabriel's sister Florence serves as his personal Jeremiah, one of many biblical references in the novel, reminding him of all the dirt he's done in his life. Their lives are centered around the church in Harlem and their own demons, wounds and unresolved family issues. The first part of the book, chronicling John's observations about his everyday life, describing the ritual and ceremony of the black church and showing John's status as an outsider in New York, establishes the template for the personal insight and the lyrical beauty of the novel. But Mountain really starts to pick up when Roy comes home after being beaten up by white kids after deliberately trying to pick a fight. Filled with a potent but emotionally hollow indignation, Gabriel goes on a rant about whites and the ugliness/cowardice of his son John, bickers bitterly with his sister Florence and slaps his wife around until Roy cusses him out, which prompts Gabriel to give him a brutal beating. From then on the novel progresses to a Saturday night prayer meeting where their life story is told in disorientingly gorgeous flashbacks, nearly biblical in moral scope, told in a language that's ornate, biblical, poetic and beautiful. The bulk of it centers around Gabriel and how he became a combination of Dostoevsky's Stavrogin and the reverend Ike. What makes Gabriel such a chilling character is that Baldwin doesn't present him as a cardboard archetype of evil, but shows the circumstances that made him who he is, and the consequences of his actions that spread that evil about. Baldwin's creation serves as his finest retort to Bigger Thomas, the famous psychopath as victim of Richard Wright's Native Son, not his essays on the subject, which are petty, overwritten, off-the-mark and highly overrated. Unlike Wright's creation of Thomas, which he used as a indicator to damm the evils of racism, Baldwin's Gabriel, while not free from the brutal damage of bigotry, is a monster primarily of his own volition. After spending his teenage years and early adult life drinking, fighting and carousing up a storm, Gabriel finds religion and becomes a minister, and for a while it soothes the demons inside of him. He finds a devoted wife and tends to a congregation. But his lust overtakes him and he has an affair with a local "heathen," which results in her getting pregnant. Instead of facing up to it, Gabriel steals money from his wife to help send her away, pretends that nothing happened and acts like he is the same moral figure. It is the first of many scenes in which he uses a fake piety to buffer the memory of one of his actions, and the results, as the novel progresses, are deceit, heartbreak, treachery and death, although not directly by his hands. Gabriel's sister Florence and his wife Elizabeth are two sides of the same coin. Both left the south to escape the pain, madness and cruelty of their environment in search of a better life up north. Both didn't find it. Florence married a down-on-his-luck lazy drunk, and Elizabeth married a poor, yet sweet, bright and decent man, who was broken down by the police and the system. Throughout his career, Baldwin's depiction of women has been schitzophrenic, especially when he decided to become a spokesman for the civil rights movement in the 60's and parroted their dogma on gender. It must be said, however, that he was on the side of gender progress more often than not( particularly later in his life, given his vigorous defense of The Color Purple) and the nuanced way he examines both of their lives is one of this novels strengths. Another one of the novel's strengths, and it's central character, is John, a bright, sensitive, heartbreakingly beautiful soul on which nothing is lost. Devoted to his mother and emotionally scarred from the viciousness of his father and environment, he distances himself from religion and buries himself in movies and school. But in the end the nightmare of the Grimes' history weighs on him and he has to either break away or join in the sadomasochistic family dance with Jesus. Seeing all the, to quote Yeats, "Terrible Beauty" of the revival meeting, he undergoes a wildly surrealistic conversion to God, bringing the story full circle. An the end the novel leaves you with so many questions. Can John brave his pains through prayer and praise? Can Gabriel reconcile his holy side with his evil side, or is that holy side just a sophisticated front to smoothen that evil out? Will Elizabeth ever find happiness with Gabriel and reconcile the death of her first husband? Can Florence find an emotionally comfortable space between the personal hell of society and her personal hell of her family? Along the way of telling the stories of the Grimes family, the novel works magic on so many levels. Here Baldwin's devotion to structure equaling form works at it's absolute best, as the backdrop and background of the black church fuses perfectly with the novel's language. You can see that in beautiful scenic montages that show the joy, pain, exaltation and horror of being in the spirit, the anguish one has to have to want to go through such a state, the stream of conscious power of a sermon, the horrific, all too real and all too damaging father/son dynamic between Gabriel, Roy and John, the tragic ethos of Elizabeth's first love with Richard, his subsequent frame-up by the police and suicide and the wounded yet beautiful daughter/son dynamic that Elizabeth has with John. Here Baldwin takes subtle shared experiences of African American life and makes them undeniably powerful art. Rereading Mountain, it is easy to see the connection and complex relationship Morrison had with Baldwin. Like he did in this novel, Morrison's best work highlights the universal in the African American experience by focusing on the personal and interior of black life. Mountain's greatest triumph is exactly that, as John Grimes and his struggles don't belong only to the scope of African American history, but also of the narrator of In Search Of Lost Time's finite descriptions of his life and world, Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's Portrait of The Artist as A Young Man, struggling to search for self and make sense of his life, and in the end Joseph, hero of the Old Testament, desperately trying to come to terms with the nightmare of his family. In 2013, when a fragmented America is distancing itself from its common culture and therefore its soul, we need to hear James Baldwin's voice. In troubled times like these, Americans need to fall back on the voices that have, throughout history, emboldened its democratic ideals. James Baldwin is one of those voices, and once again I urge you to read his body of work. In his fiction, Go Tell It On The Mountain is the best place to start

Review by Future Man

While I love all of this series that I've yet made my way into, this is truly a favorite for me personally. Like many of my favorites, when taken by itself it may not have the charm that it does within the context of the rest of the series. However, the juxtaposition of this volume to Vol. 8: Women is perfect to me. Both represent philosophical quandaries of what it is to be either a Woman or, in this case, a Guy... Guys takes place entirely in the bar. Characters come and go. Time doesn't mean much. Days and months don't see much distinction as we're drawn into the same time-transcendent, violent, and hilarious stupor. Drunken tests of manhood and battles to the bottom of buckets of booze ensue. Not a whole lot of development of story here, but definitely a lot of fun.

Review by Future Man

Perhaps the finest craftsmanship yet applied to the graphic novel form. Chris Ware's second graphic novel is stunning! Not a book, but actually 14 distinct books housed in a boardgame-like box, each with their own personality and sensibility. Ranging from giant boards inscribed with non-linear symbolic narratives to densely literary hardcover volumes and wordless flipbooks, there is a vast array of storytelling available here. Without a necessarily ascribed reading order, we're left to wander through the lives of the inhabitants of one old apartment building in whatever way we choose and explore the gritty details long since abandoned in corners of the box. Each little (or in some cases, quite substantial) book leaves much to be said for itself and the construction and design of the whole package often plays into the reading of the story itself. Very worthy of careful examination. A whole class could easily be built around the study of literary form shown here. Read it, let's talk!

Review by Peter Sheppard

I'm like halfway done reading this right now. the story begins with Asterios' apartment burning down on his 50th birthday. Interspersed with the story of his life after the fire, his stillborn brother (who would have been named Ignazio) narrates flashbacks to his days as an architecture professor, his ex wife, and pretty much his whole life. I hope it will explain his whole life up to the fire just in time for him to die in the real time story. The art in the book is amazing! It's super 90s. David Mazzucchilli uses purple as the dark shade (instead of black) throughout the book and uses yellow, blue and red as accent colors for his present story, his dead brother's perceptions of his past, and the feminine influences in his life (respectively). His stillborn twin explores various topics abstractly as they relate to Asterios' life including areas of metaphysics, psychology, art theory, and epistemology.

Review by Kryssanne Adams

Beautifully and simply illustrated, this story is insane, unpredictable, and guaranteed to hold your attention. With the introduction of a new character in every chapter, each seeks to somehow ruin the protagonist's life or add a new unusual twist to his horrible and hilarious journey.

Review by Jasmine (Jammys) Chang

This book is bitter, beautiful, hilarious and honest. It's full of dykes, deception, drugs, trickery and broken hearts, as well as gorgeous illustrations consisting of a black, white and red color scheme. You get a good glimpse into lesbian and sex work culture, and the illustrations definitely enhance Michelle Tea's writing. Rent Girl doesn't portray prostitutes as helpless victims, immoral harlots or idealized heroes; it reveals their humanity and struggles with the moral question of sex work. It will likely challenge your perspective on the sex industry, whether you be for it or against it.

Review by Jasmine (Jammys) Chang

This collection of Adrian Tomine's stories and characters is enticing and bizarre, yet very relatable. He often deals with themes of sexual tension or loneliness, so the plots are awkward, humorous and exposing of the human nature. However, I found that his endings left me extremely unsatisfied as a reader, as they were abrupt and not very emotionally fulfilling. I'd still overall recommend the book.

Review by Jasmine (Jammys) Chang

Fascinating, thorough, informative and comprehensive. The accounts and experiences of queer prisoners are included, as well as radical activists and theorists. This book rejects the Gay Rights movements' push for gay marriage, hate crime legislation and militarization; it acknowledges that these solutions perpetuate structures harmful to our communities, and instead calls for total abolition of oppressive institutions as opposed to their reform. It's radical as all heck. I'd say that this book's an essential read for all anarchists, abolitionists and queer activists, since these perspectives aren't often discussed in relation to each other, especially in more mainstream subcultures; however, the intersections of these ideologies is undeniable and extremely important.

Review by Jasmine (Jammys) Chang

Both the art and story seem to be fairly simple at first, but the characters are revealed to be more multi-dimensional and endearing than they seem, which is always relieving. Craig Thompson carefully and tenderly unwinds the plot, with much attention to the emotions of his characters. It's sort of heart-breaking, sort of sappy, but also sweet. Basically, if you're into melty feelings, this book's full of them.

Review by Allen Coderre

A highly under rated documentary on the inner workings of our belief sytems, monetary institutions, and the current, anglo-saxon orientated, power structure which seeks to maintain it's corrupting influence on our species naturual/spiritual evolution. A must see for those who are unaware of the shady dealings that are supporting this tin-plated facace.

Review by Kyle Beckhorn

Sweet mushroom identification guide. What makes this guide better than most, is the way it classifies mushrooms. In the front and back covers, you narrow down your mushroom's features (Does it have gills, does it have a stem, does it look like a sponge, etc...) This allows you to flip to a section of similar mushrooms. From there, your mushroom is likely only a few pages away. There are lots of color photos, and descriptions of edibility and habitat too. This is the best mushroom field guide I've come across for the Pacific Northwest.

Review by Kyle Beckhorn

Do you want to learn how to tie knots? This book is for you. There are lots of step-by-step color pictures that will aid in your knot tying adventures. This book includes variations on the bowline, tying a knot in the middle of a rope (a bite), to making a rope mat or other ornamental (and useful) knots. Knowing how to tie a knot for any occasion will make you a useful citizen and friend. I highly recommend this book!

Review by Kyle Beckhorn

This book parallels Ender's Game, but is told from the perspective of "Bean". Bean is an escapee from an illegal genetic engineering laboratory, who ends up in Battle School along with Ender. With his whacky genius genes and the company of influential Ender, the faculty have their hands full, and a decent chance of survival against the "Buggers" (an ant-like alien race that has attacked Earth).

Review by Kyle Beckhorn

This is a sweet Sci-Fi novel. Set in Earth's future, where human kind has narrowly survived 2 separate invasions from an ant-like alien race. The promising youth are selected at a young age to train to become war strategists. Ender is just one boy in an elite team of tactical geniuses, pushing his limits and taking on responsibilities that could possibly define the fate of human survival.