Total F*cking Godhead (Post Hill) is the complete story of the complex and enigmatic artist, Chris Cornell. It’s the riveting account of a blue-collar, high school dropout emerging from Seattle, Washington, to become one of the greatest singer-songwriters and voices of his generation. With input from people who knew and worked with him — together with Cornell’s own words — the book recounts in great detail the rise of his immortal band Soundgarden as they emerged from the 1980s post-punk underground to dominate popular culture in the ‘90s alongside other Seattle bands like Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana. Long-time Seattle resident and rock writer Corbin Reiff examines Cornell’s dynamic solo career, as well as is his time in Audioslave. He delves into Cornell’s…
Comments closedTag: conversation
Kate Greene’s Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth (St. Martin’s) is an essay collection inspired by the author’s four-month stay inside a simulated Martian habitat. When it comes to Mars, the focus is often on how to get there: the rockets, the engines, the fuel. But upon arrival, what will it actually be like? In 2013, Greene moved to Mars. That is, along with five fellow crew members, she embarked on NASA’s first HI-SEAS mission, a simulated Martian environment located on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. For four months she lived, worked, and slept in an isolated geodesic dome, conducting a sleep study on her crew mates and gaining incredible insight into human behavior in…
Comments closedWhat can you do to make the world a better place and create a more satisfying life for yourself? In his new book, Touching the Jaguar: Transforming Fear Into Action to Change Your Life (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, invites us to answer that question. Perkins details how shamanism converted him from an economic hit man to a crusader for transforming a failing Death Economy (exploiting resources that are declining at accelerating rates) into a Life Economy (cleaning up pollution, recycling, and developing resource-regenerative technologies). He describes the power our perceptions have for molding reality, both individually and globally. And he provides a strategy for each of us to change our lives and defend our territory — the…
Comments closedIn an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations of families enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens permanently off the conventional course. Like the 10 biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another; violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning — even cancer and a brain tumor — play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal of artmaking and drugs. With no time for hand-wringing, Miriam advances, convinced she can fix everything, while a devastated Craig retreats to their property in rural Washington State…
Comments closedIn a matter of weeks, Massachusetts has been overrun by an insidious rabies-like virus that is spread by saliva. But unlike rabies, the disease has a terrifyingly short incubation period of an hour or less. Those infected quickly lose their minds and are driven to bite and infect as many others as they can before they inevitably succumb. Hospitals are inundated with the sick and dying, and hysteria has taken hold. To try to limit its spread, the commonwealth is under quarantine and curfew. But society is breaking down and the government’s emergency protocols are faltering. With Survivor Song (William Morrow), Bram Stoker Award-winning author Paul Tremblay once again demonstrates his mastery in a chilling and all-too-plausible novel that will leave readers racing through the…
Comments closedThe writer whom the Los Angeles Times calls “part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott” now brings us her quirky and compassionate account of holding local office. Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines — a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane — isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street to the recall campaign…
Comments closedWhat happens when a childhood hobby grows into a lifelong career? The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Drawn & Quarterly), Adrian Tomine’s funniest and most revealing foray into autobiography, offers an array of unexpected answers. When a sudden medical incident lands Tomine in the emergency room, he begins to question if it was really all worthwhile: despite the accolades and opportunities of a seemingly charmed career, it’s the gaffes, humiliations, slights, and insults he’s experienced (or caused) within the industry that loom largest in his memory. Tomine illustrates the amusing absurdities of how we choose to spend our time, all the while mining his conflicted relationship with comics and comics culture. But in between chaotic book tours, disastrous interviews, and cringe-inducing interactions with other artists,…
Comments closedLauren Cress teaches writing at a small college outside of Washington, DC. In the classroom, she is poised, smart, and kind, well-liked by her students and colleagues. But in her personal life, Lauren is troubled and isolated, still grappling with the sudden death of her parents 10 years earlier. She seems to exist at a remove from everyone around her until a new student joins her class: charming, magnetic Siri, who appears to be everything Lauren wishes she herself could be. They fall headlong into an all-consuming friendship that feels to Lauren like she is reclaiming her lost adolescence. When Siri invites her on a trip home to Sweden for the summer, Lauren impulsively accepts, intrigued by how Siri describes it: green, fresh, and new,…
Comments closedHow do you stop a rogue president? How do you protect our country from a man who lies, who obstructs justice, and who seeks to cheat with foreign powers to get reelected? Our constitution offers one remedy: impeachment. Thanks to the courageous actions of public servants who came forward to report his abuses of power, on December 18, 2019, President Donald J. Trump became just the third president in US history to be impeached by the House of Representatives. In Endgame; Inside the Impeachment of Donald J. Trump (Harry N. Abrams), Congressman Eric Swalwell offers the personal account of his path to office and how he and his colleagues resisted, investigated, and impeached a corrupt president. After the shock of the 2016 election and Trump’s…
Comments closedZach St. George’s The Journeys of Trees: A Story About Forests, People, and the Future (W. W. Norton) is an urgent and illuminating portrait of forest migration, and of the people studying the forests of the past, protecting the forests of the present, and planting the forests of the future. Forests are restless. Any time a tree dies or a new one sprouts, the forest that includes it has shifted. When new trees sprout in the same direction, the whole forest begins to migrate, sometimes at astonishing rates. Today, however, an array of obstacles – humans felling trees by the billions, invasive pests transported through global trade – threaten to overwhelm these vital movements. Worst of all, the climate is changing faster than ever before,…
Comments closed