A worker-owned community event space
Located at 48 Commerce Street
Open 10am - 10pm (except Sun)
Book Reviews
Like you, we love books... and the next best thing to reading books is reading about books! Below you'll find an assortment of reviews for titles that we regularly stock. Also, be sure to check out our online catalog.
Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels by Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri and Lauren
It's difficult to know quite what to make of Graphic Witness. As soon as you hold it, you know you have here an impossibly important book. It seems at once seminal and historic, a graphic witness, as the title indicates, of the very roots of the graphic novel.
Here we have four important stories told in woodcut and without words, collected for us by George A. Walker, himself an...
Makers
The major themes I’ve written about here lately – the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing, the digital/network culture – are all central to Makers. And given my research and writing interests, it’s a foregone conclusion that any work of cyberpunk or other near-future sci fi is going...
Magicians
Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy, depressed, high-achieving Brooklyn kid who finds himself hijacked from his Princeton interview and whisked away to Brakebills Academy, a school of magic upstate on the Hudson. He passes the entrance exam and begins his education as a...
Make Your Place
Make Your Place: Affordable and Sustainable Nesting Skills by Raleigh Briggs is reminiscent of DIY books of the ’70s with its entirely hand-lettered pages and illustrations by the author, but it’s an up-to-date introductory course to beginning herbalism for the home.
Each topic is treated quickly, in usually no more than a page or two. I’m still a newbie to herbal remedies and household...
End of Money and the Future of Civilization
It’s too late for anyone to pretend that the U.S. government, whether under President Barack Obama or anyone else, can divert our nation from long-term economic decline. The U.S. is increasingly in a state of political, economic, and moral paralysis, caught as it were between the “rock” of protracted recession and the “hard place” of terminal government debt.
Even if the stock market c...