Luke Sherwood's Writings
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Article
Mar.24.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
Happy families, with bright, live-wire teenage daughters and cricket-mad sons, suffer and become obliterated in Sri Lanka’s endless civil war. The usual family aspirations of university educations and good marriages evaporate as war’s mayhem sweeps the island.
Joanna Luloff’s The Beach at Galle Road is a series of linked short pieces that one can read as a...
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Article
Mar.15.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
In Hawk Quest we follow the epic journey of a small and shifting group of questers literally around the ends of the earth: from England to the west coast of Greenland, over the northern cape of Norway and into Russia by way of the White Sea. The year is 1072 AD, the Conqueror’s Normans remain busy subjugating Britain (through the time-honored means of rape,...
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Mar.03.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
There are two people the title of Rebecca Dana’s memoir Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, which is appropriate in this book, for it spins around an axis pulled taut between opposite poles. Rebecca Dana, a reporter for the Daily Beast and Newseek, and formerly with the Wall Street Journal, has assembled not only an unstintingly honest exposé of her searching...
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Article
Feb.19.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
Blaise Pascal said the world is divided into two types of people: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous. Clearly into the first group do we designate Wilmet Forsythe, the first-person narrator of Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings. A faithful churchgoer to High Anglican services in London in the 1950s, she...
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Article
Jan.27.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
At a horrific, life-changing moment, a Chinese immigrant in the United States under a false name and false pretenses thinks of some wisdom his mother had given him. He is about to be separated from his hand as two thugs drag him to a table saw, he remembers his mother’s aphorism: “Trust rock, she told him. Break fear upon rock. … Go toward fear. Trust fear. Steer...
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Article
Jan.20.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
How does a well-meaning man, living the principles of an idyllic and idealistic upbringing, cope with the wrenching changes in his life? How does a visionary leader engender his ideals in his followers? Lauren Groff provides memorable answers to these questions in her knowing and compassionate second novel, Arcadia.
A cult has grown up around Handy...
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Jan.12.2013
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
Juan Gabriel Vásquez makes his title plural, because the informers are everywhere in this interesting and self-reflective novel. The author plays himself, so to speak, in writing this book, and the narrative taking up the first three quarters poses as a book which has been published. However, there is very nearly nothing we can consider meta-fictional here; Sr....
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Article
Dec.31.2012
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
Now I want to move to Ireland. After listening to the lilting, fluid conversational rhythms in John McGahern’s By the Lake, I can’t wait to pull up stakes and move to the Sacred Sod. It doesn’t hurt that the late Mr. McGahern set all these charming spoken words in the mortar of his own graceful narrative. The whole is more than agreeable, it’s enchanting. I’m...
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Article
Dec.16.2012
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
Events in Amy Greene’s captivating, soulful Bloodroot swirl around Myra Lamb, a pretty girl from the hills of Appalachia. This is yet another stunning debut piece from an author with superior gifts. You will get a full, rich read here, as each of a selected handful of characters narrates a first-person segment of this saga. And “saga” captures the tone perfectly...
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Article
Nov.22.2012
Basso Profundo Book Review Blog
With its clever structure and highly personal content, The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti captures the struggle of one woman to forgive herself for imagined transgressions in her past. Protagonist Lily recalls a continuing series of sensual encounters, some of which cause her guilt, and from which we are never very far. In fact, I recognize these as the best...
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About Luke
My life started in the last century, and so did my reading life, about fifteen years later. I was born in Ithaca, NY, and grew up in the Mohawk Valley in Central New York State. I didn't really start reading with any kind of discernment until tragically late...
Luke’s Favorite Books
Housekeeping, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Emigrants, Tinkers, Cloud Atlas, The Gathering, The Great Fire, Evidence of Things Unseen, Tree of Smoke...