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Tag: premise denial

A Wilderness of Error, Errol Morris

So okay. If you have read Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, which I have, or if you are interested in true crime, which I am not, you may have heard of this guy Jeffrey MacDonald, whose wife and two daughters were murdered and he said hippies did it. A Wilderness of Error is about this case and the many flaws and unreasonablenesses about the case the government (and popular culture) built against Jeffrey MacDonald. Morris has done an extraordinary amount of research into this case, conducting interviews with everyone who was involved in the case and survived to the…

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Review: Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher

Note: I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher for review consideration. In my professional career, academics have occasionally been really, really snotty to me when I didn’t deserve snottiness. This isn’t a judgment on academics. When you work with a very large number of people from any demographic group, it is statistically likely that a couple of them will be jerks. But still: I have sometimes asked an academic a simple question, and s/he has responded with — instead of an answer to my question — a paragraphs-long, sarcasm-and-righteousness-laden treatise on his/her mistreatment at the hands…

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Not a Review: Attachments, Rainbow Rowell

Y’all, look, I like to suspend disbelief as much as the next girl and probably more than some. I’m willing to roll with an awful lot of fictional punches, and the reason for this is that I know that if you don’t accept the premise of a book, you are refusing to engage with it on the most basic level. There is then no point in reading it, and if you insist on reading it (maybe because, as in this case, you hope that the book will somehow make its nonsense premise work), there is subsequently no point talking about…

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