Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged New York City

The Good Fairies of New York

Having recently moved to New York City, one of my first excursions was to the Strand Bookstore. Late one evening in May, I walked into the shop and, feeling slightly overwhelmed but giddy with excitement, I ventured into the maze of tables and shelves surfeit with books. Within ten minutes, I happened upon a book entitled The Good Fairies of New York. The title caught my attention: fairies? New York?

Atmospheric Disturbances

In some cases, you may be midway through a story, novel, or film before realizing you’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. He or she is biased, withholding information, or mentally unstable. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s disturbing story “The Yellow Wallpaper” springs to mind as just one example.) In Atmospheric Disturbances, the debut novel by Rivka Galchen, it is apparent early on that the main character, psychiatrist Dr.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line

When I first read the jacket for Martha A Sandweiss’s Passing Strange, I did a literal double take. I read those introductory paragraphs over and over again, the words slipping and sliding over my brain without sinking in.

Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain

A thriller that spans five centuries, Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain is entertaining and thought provoking. Thirteen generations of eccentric New York City doctors navigate genius, madness and morality. This book is eerie, smart, unique, and very delicately crafted, telling many stories in every layer of time. The Van Schulers and Steenwycks are a family of eccentric, genius, medical people, mostly doctors, some more on the fringe than others, some mad.

Cartwheels in a Sari: A Memoir of Growing Up Cult

Don’t be fooled by the somewhat whimsical title of Jayanti Tamm’s memoir Cartwheels in a Sari; this account of a young woman’s life as "growing up cult" couples the childlike innocence of a cartwheel with the feeling of inertia and tumbling; she sums this up in a passage from the end of the book: "The inversion of my body, losing track of gravity and direction, was disorienting and delirious.

Between Here and April

Deborah Copaken Kogan’s novel Between Here and April begins with Elizabeth Burns, a modern New York journalist and mother of two young girls, recalling her first-grade friend April Cassidy’s sudden disappearance.

Miles from Nowhere

Present-day New York City is incomparable to its former seedy and dismal self. It was a city of survival up through the eighties, and as Nami Mun shows in her novel, Miles from Nowhere, people were either crushed by the city or driven to great lengths to make it through the day. The story follows the teenage Joon, the daughter of a Korean family who immigrated to New York.

Our City Dreams

A film is the best way to showcase stories in motion—literally and figuratively. Our City Dreams is a combination love letter to overtly feminist artists and the city—New York City—in which they reside. Representing a range of women artists whose age and work span nearly six decades, the film’s scope never becomes too wide or convoluted. Throughout the movie, the lives and careers of the women shift, as some find new success, some take time off, and several celebrate their own artistic retrospectives and milestone birthdays.

Culture Project presents... In Conflict (11/11/2008)

There was no better way to celebrate Veteran’s day then going to see In Conflict. Not only will it remind you of the trying times our soldiers are facing in Iraq, but also why you are proud to be an American. Based on journalist Yvonne Latty’s 2006 book of the same name, Douglas Wager digests Latty’s interviews with Iraq War Veterans, who have just returned from their tour of duty, into a series of monologues.

The Late Bloomer's Revolution

Cute chick + NYC + media job + boyfriend troubles + comedically quirky friends and family + insipid metaphors + lightbulb moment resolution = book deal! Next, it will surely be opening at a multiplex near you. This read was so formulaic I had to remind myself that The Late Bloomer's Revolution is actually a memoir, not fictitious chick lit.

Sex and the City: The Movie

Far as I can tell, there’s never been a consensus on Sex and the City’s feminist appeal. It shows intimate female relationships, but it’s heteronormative, white, and the characters often talk past each other. The women live (mostly) sexually liberated lives, but they’re nevertheless forever in search of the perfect man to fulfill their emotional needs.

Dérive

The city that never sleeps. 9/11. Diversity. Pizza and delis. Flash. Cash.

Lipstick Jungle

Lipstick Jungle is the latest installment of literature from Candace Bushnell. Three very powerful women attempt to not only survive, but to succeed in the cut throat business world of New York City. Victory, Nico and Wendy are all at the top of the respective fields (fashion, media and movies). Though they may be at the top of their game, it doesn’t make life easier.

Guide to Brooklyn: 2007

Has the ganglial network that is today's Internet annulled the need for books, especially guidebooks?

The Year of Endless Sorrows

I loved this book. And that is all the more impressive because I wasn't expecting to. Adam Rapp is an accomplished playwright with a growing reputation. But playwrights do not always make good novelists. However, The Year of Endless Sorrows demonstrates that he is just as formidable as a novelist as he is a playwright. This is a novel that should be read. A thinly disguised autobiography, The Year of Endless Sorrows tells the tale of a young man who comes to New York City in the early 1990s to become a writer.

Leap Days: Chronicles of a Midlife Move

Given the choice between staying where your career, friends, home and loved ones are and moving to a large city where you knew no one, what would you pick? Lucky for readers, Katherine Lanpher chose the latter. Lanpher, a newspaper reporter and radio host, grew up in Illinois and made her journalistic mark in Minnesota. Among other notable achievements, she was the first female metro columnist at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. In her late 40s, she traded her Midwest life for a new one in the Big Apple, and went to work for Al Franken and Air America.

The Journal of Short Film: Volume V

Every film in this volume is so impressive, so full of the detail and thought that makes a film not just good or even great, but f*cking phenomenal _that it’s difficult to say anything more than _just buy a subscription already.

We, Too, Must Love

We, Too, Must Love is Ann Aldrich’s second book of Kinseyesque reporting on New York City lesbians in the 1950s. At the time of the book’s original publication, in 1958, it was revolutionary. Any public debate or information on lesbians at the time had been strictly in medical and psychological terms. This in-depth look at the lives of lesbians in New York City was both shocking and lifesaving.

Giuliani Time

What politician can, in the span of a few decades, go from being a Kennedy Democrat to a Reagan Republican and, finally, to a man for all parties as Time’s Person of the Year? The answer, as Kevin Keating’s film reveals, is Rudy Giuliani. Keating turns a critical eye on Giuliani’s path towards becoming America’s darling politician by offering a view of the New York Mayor’s pre-September 11th history – a history marked by racism and the overseeing of police brutality.
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