Yeah, yeah, it’s a long wandering mess that seems to change focus as much as a bifocaled grandmother. But my cover story on greed and Americans’ changing views of capitalism in the January 1 issue of the Inland Empire Weekly , meant to be a (favorable) review of four recent books on…

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MTV’s long-running reality show The Real World tosses a group of contrasting strangers together and then steps back to watch what happens. Natsuo Kirino’s novel Real World throws a killer into the lives of four young Japanese women and does pretty much the same. It’s not only the circumstances that make…

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Life under military rule is an absurd mix of the comic and the tragic. Cartoonist DeLisle, whose previous books document trips to North Korea and China, spent 14 months in Burma—now the self-proclaimed Myanmar– beginning in 2005. This simply drawn memoir accounts his days there while traveling with his wife,…

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Listening through the two-CDs in Bill Frisell’s History, Mystery is much like going through the dozen panels of cartoon artist R Crumb’s “A Short History of America.” In a dozen wordless panels, Crumb takes us through an untouched pastoral setting which gives give way to a single rail line, then a…

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