#susan tacent

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation

Edited by Christopher Kondrich, Lucy Spelman, and Susan Tacent.

[thecommonmag]

Susan Tacent reviews Maria Terrone's collection of essays

Maria Terrone’s grandparents were among the estimated nine million people who emigrated from Italy between 1881 and 1927. While her parents were born in the United States, her connection to Italy is deep, informing her identity and experiences as much as being a lifelong New Yorker has.

In At Home in the New World, Terrone shares how she has been shaped by this double set of roots. A collection of 21 essays, the book is divided into five sections — “Hide and Seek,” “Obsessions,” “The Italian Thing,” “At Work: Factories and Fifth Avenue,” and “From New York to the World” — that follow a loose progression from childhood to first jobs to her working life as an editor. Terrone is also an accomplished poet, and her poet's sensibility lights up the prose — her sentences are shapely, lyrical, and full of descriptions that bring her words to life.

[thecommonmag]

Susan Tacent reviews George Saunders’ new book, Lincoln at the Bardo, which “took twenty years of rumination, and another four to write” and explores “the question of how we survive the loss of a loved one.”