Beautifully written with great wisdom and sensitivity, this book brings together several genres -- true crime, regional history, and memoir -- to creaBeautifully written with great wisdom and sensitivity, this book brings together several genres -- true crime, regional history, and memoir -- to create something new and exciting. The book is about the 1980 murder of two women, but in addition to exploring the lives of these women and the court cases around their murders, Eisenberg explores difficult questions about how violence fractures communities and how notions of community and identity play out in the criminal justice system. Eisenberg paints a rich, nuanced portrait of Appalachia and West Virginia that avoids stereotypes and does justice to the region's vibrancy and complexity. This book will challenge your expectations of the true crime genre, which is exactly why you should read it. An inspiring debut!...more
This book is just delicious! It is a cartwheel in book form, a mint julep with Pop Rocks, a squeegee gem of neon proportions! It’s about a temp workerThis book is just delicious! It is a cartwheel in book form, a mint julep with Pop Rocks, a squeegee gem of neon proportions! It’s about a temp worker who bounces between a variety of surreal jobs, encountering all kinds of strange obstacles and friends and lovers along the way, and it will resonate with anyone who has ever felt precarious in a job. (So -- probably everybody?) It's kooky and sad and fun, balancing bubbly humor with important issues of labor and permanence. It's also a great exploration of the very topical issue of interchangeability. If we define ourselves by our jobs, then are we interchangeable with anyone who can perform the same tasks? How easily can we replace someone else, and should we? What makes us unique? Leichter does a wonderful job tackling these big questions about being human in an engaging, moving, delightfully weird book. ...more
Loading...
