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THE BOOKSTORE BOOK, KARL MARX PRIVATE EYE & NAMING A HURRICANE – 3 Books Reviewed

Lehman Weichselbaum

The Bookstore Book Ron Kolm Pink Trees Press, 2023 Karl Marx Private Eye Jim Feast PM Press, 2023 Naming a Hurricane Madeline Artenberg Pink Trees Press, 2023 THE BOOKSTORE BOOK In The Bookstore Book: A Memoir, prolific poet and prosaist Ron Kolm submits his own version of looking back. For Kolm, speaking through prose essays and "poems" (really prose essays in chopped-up lines), the life of a bookseller was both a career choice and a special window to the world. As always, if you're a writer, you don't have to look for experience, experience will find you. From early adulthood, Kolm would hit town, and, like the rest of us needing a job, went shopping for one. And like many people of letters, he knew that a job in a bookstore would make the best personal fit. More often than not, Kolm's quest was rewarded. He found his jobs with often ridiculous ease, earning him a not overly strenuous workload, a sustenance paychec...
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On Barbara O’Brien’s OPERATORS AND THINGS

Neil Martinson

In the early ’60s, Ace Books, a publisher known primarily for science fiction, released a small paperbound edition of a 1958 book called Operators and Things by a woman writing under the name Barbara O’Brien. Although ostensibly a work of non-fiction, it reads a bit like a missing Philip K. Dick novel; its subtitle “The Inner Life of a Schizophrenic,” while no doubt enticing to some readers, does no justice to this mystifying, true-life initiatory tale. The author starts out by describing her experiences in the competitive, male-dominated business world of 1950s New York, detailing the various “hook operating” methods by which her aggressive coworkers would ascend the corporate ladder: vicious techniques redolent of Cold War paranoia that ranged from simple slander to complex, backstabbing daisychains of Machiavellian proportions. The institutional sociopathy she details hinges on adroit, covert manipulation and contr...
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