Black & White By Lewis Shiner Subterranean, 376 pp. “The past,” William Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” Lewis Shiner’s new Southern noir Black & Whiteset in the author’s hometown of Durhamis only the latest novel to rearticulate this central, inescapable American truth, the endless return of the secret histories and collective […]
Gerry Canavan
Posted inArt
A ferocious dystopian novel from Sarah Hall
Daughters of the North By Sarah Hall Harper Perennial, 240 pp. There’s a scene early on in Daughters of the North, by part-time North Carolinian Sarah Hall, that is so viscerally horrifying that it functions as a useful shorthand for the novel’s dystopia as a whole. In a post-apocalyptic England so ravaged by foreign wars […]
Posted inBooks
Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm puncture the myths of SDS
Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History By Harvey Pekar and Gary Dumm Hill and Wang, 224 pp. It’s a bit hard to tell whether Harvey Pekar has come to praise the Students for a Democratic Society or bury it. In a new book, Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, Pekar and […]
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Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship
Mobility without Mayhem By Jeremy Packer Duke University Press, 349 pp. In Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship, Jeremy Packer takes his methodological cue from the late French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who in his 1986 travelogue, America, memorably claimed, “All you need to know about American society can be gleaned from an anthropology of […]
Posted inElections
Inside the Ron Paul Revolution
Super Tuesday may not have gone the way Alan Soutter had hoped, but he isn’t giving up. “You take these hits, and it hurts, but you come back and you’re stronger. We’re gonna keep going. We’re not gonna stop.” Soutter, a tech support manager who works in RTP, is the lead organizer for Ron Paul […]
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Lamenting the fading of black history
On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail By Charles E. Cobb Jr. Algonquin Books, 388 pp. One of the more startling revelations of Charles Cobb Jr.’s On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail, out last month from Algonquin Books, is just how rapidly […]
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Barkley L. Hendricks in Durham for his first career retrospective
Barkley L. Hendricks talks about types of paint like they’re old lovers. “Oil painting kind of seduced me after leaving high school,” he says. “Then I became aware of acrylicand then, during the course of that involvement, other paints came on the scene, like magna and synthetics, so I gravitated to them.” They’ll all be […]
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No Easy Victories documents voices from inside the struggles for African liberation
No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists Over a Half Century, 1950-2000 Edited by William Minter, Gail Hovey and Charles Cobb Jr. Africa World Press, 262 pp. “Tell no lies; claim no easy victories.” These words from West African political leader Amilcar Cabral return us to the essence of revolutionary politics, to struggle. In […]
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Inside the Triangle Go scene
My nemesis is a 12-year-old named Adam. When I first played Go with Adam Plesser over the summer at Francesca’s coffeehouse in Durham, I entered the game with what I thought was a healthy mix of generosity and arrogance. Go easy on him, I thought to myself, he’s just a kid. Wrong. He crushed me, […]
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Ackland Art Museum set to unveil renovations
The Ackland Art Museum on UNC’s campus in Chapel Hill has just undergone its first major renovation and reinstallation since 1991, beginning this fall with all-new exhibits and an all-new sense of purpose. “We have some pieces that everyone wants to seecertain core things that are important, and oftentimes our faculty rely on them for […]