#review

Hitchcock’s debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family’s North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock’s story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant. —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ↗

— Publishers Weekly

#death

I wanted the syrupy taste of this small rebellion. And this stupid machine was denying that bit of freedom to me . . . just like everyone else. ↗

— Laura Bickle

#freedom #laine-s-fave #freedom

The endorsements on books aren’t entirely impartial. Unbeknownst to the average reader, blurbs are more often than not from the writer’s best friends, colleagues or teachers, or from authors who share the same editor, publisher or agent. They represent a tangled mass of friendships, rivalries, favors traded and debts repaid, not always in good faith. ↗

— Rachel Donadio

#endorsements #publishing #reviews #faith

My congratulations to you, sir. Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. ↗

— Samuel Johnson

#funny #humour #review #funny

An oxymoronic combination of the tough and tender, [Of Mice and Men] will appeal to sentimental cynics, cynical sentimentalists...Readers less easily thrown off their trolley will still prefer Hans Andersen. [Time 1937] ↗

— Time-Life-Books

#men

Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [sic] own laws (so that after God and the Devil 'tackle a guy, they don't kick him in the head'), but each side is not above cheating—with God breaking the rules occasionally by throwing in 'a miracle'. Strangely, Mailer doesn’t mention Jesus in this agonising analogy, but then the notion of the 'super-sub' may be an image too far even for him. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#book-review #devil #god #jesus #miracles

I think that curiosity happened on these reviews where I was just a guest of the reviewer, because it introduced me to new cuisines and to the idea of cooking as a mechanism for studying other cultures and understanding other parts of the world. ↗

— Ted Allen

#cooking #cuisines #cultures #curiosity #guest

We're living at a time where if you do a Google search for a 'show, review and network,' you'll get 'The New York Times' and Pete Billingsley from a town you've never heard of on the same results page. It's kind of democratizing the process so that everyone has access to a distribution system to express themselves. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#distribution #everyone #express #get #google

There are few performers who would have had the audacity to even bring up the fact that they had been poorly reviewed. ↗

— Sandra Bernhard

#been #bring #even #fact #few

In LA I was watching At the Movies with Ebert and Roper, it was, nice to see them differentiate between the subject matter and the art form of making the film, and they both gave it thumbs up, and I was kind of pleased at their honesty as far as reviewers go. ↗

— Michael Berryman

#art form #as far as #between #both #differentiate