This week, I’ve been at the US naval base and Joint Task Force Operations command in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

There are dozens of stories to share, and I’ll be writing more about my experiences at Guantanamo both here on CollazoProjects and on the Matador Network in the coming weeks. In fact, you can check out two pieces I’ve already written– Sweet Digs, Harry Potter and the Real Chamber of Secrets, and 5 Things You Should Know About Guantanamo — to start getting a sense of what’s been happening here.

In the meantime, I’d like to introduce you to the happiest woman at Guantanamo.

Sam, the assistant manager of the kitchen responsible for preparing all detainee meals–not to mention galley meals for troopers–is a Korean American contractor who has been working on Guantanamo for five years.

As most terms of service at Guantanamo–military or contractor– are one year or less, Sam definitely has some seniority around here. And though she gets off the base every six months or so for vacation, the island fever that one might expect to set in after so much time here doesn’t seem to affect her in the least.

She’s quite possibly one of the most positive people I’ve met, and the troopers I met confirmed that they’ve never seen her with anything other than a smile. So… meet the happiest woman at Guantanamo, who has no plans to leave any time soon.

As Mexico City’s Local Expert for the travel website Planet Eye, I blog three times a week about news, reviews, and destinations in Mexico’s capital.

I recently wrote a review of two jazz clubs, Papa Beto and Zinco, for Planet Eye, and have since finished editing a video Francisco and I made during our September visit to both clubs:

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Como la experta local de la Ciudad de Mexico para el sitio web Planet Eye, yo escribo blogs tres veces a la semana sobre noticias, eventos, y destinos en la ciudad capital.

Hace poco, escribi una resena sobre los clubes de jazz, Papa Beto y Zinco, para Planet Eye. Desde entonces, termine con la edicion de un video que Francisco y yo hicimos durante nuestra visita a ambos clubs el mes pasado:

I’m in the midst of working on a few book reviews– Daina Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love,
David Lida’s First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Sever by Adrienne Brady, and Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer by popular travel writer, Rolf Potts– so I’ve got book reviews on my mind.

In an earlier article, I explained how you can request review copies. In this article, I explain how one writes a book review, focusing primarily on identifying the criteria you should take into consideration while reading the book you’ll be reviewing.

As with any genre, the more you read book reviews, the better you’re likely to become at writing reviews.

One of my secret pleasures is reading New York Times Book Review each Sunday. The reviewers–writers themselves, and likely just as sensitive as their subjects– are never ambivalent: they lavish praise or heap criticism on authors in full page meditations… and I must admit that I’ve kept this particular pleasure secret until now because I find the critical reviews especially appealing.

Why?

Well, because a good review is, like any good writing, cognizant of what words mean, how they should be treated, and what we, as readers, should expect of them, how we should feel after we take them in and turn them over like a prism in the light. When a book possesses shortcomings, book reviewers call authors on the gaps in their work and demand that they do better. I like reading the reviews because I’d like to think they make me a better writer and editor…and a better book reviewer.

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Reading a book in order to write a review requires a bit more attention and purpose than you’d devote as a casual reader. When reading in order to review you want to take the following ideas into account:

-What is the subject of the book? And in answering that question, you need to ask another: What has already been written about the same subject? How will this author expand the reader’s understanding of the subject (if it’s been written about extensively before)? Does the author offer new insights or an innovative articulation of an already well-treated subject?

-What is the author’s background? What makes the author uniquely qualified to write about the subject? What has the author written before? The answers to these questions vary in their relative importance depending on the genre, but are worth asking when approaching any book.

You don’t necessarily need to share the author’s background with the reader of your review. Sometimes, though, doing so is particularly appropriate. Consider, for example, David Kamp’s introduction to his review of Jules Feiffer’s Explainers, published last weekend in the Times:

“At this point, there’s an entire generation of parents and kids who know Jules Feiffer solely as a children’s book author…. It’s been eight years since he stopped doing his weekly syndicated comic strip for grown ups….”

All this information sets the reader up for a comparison of Feiffer’s new book, an anthology of 10 years worth of his work, to his existing body of work, providing the reader with useful information.

-What does the author establish as the thesis (for non-fiction) or the narrative hook (for fiction)? And then, does the author fulfill the promise implied by that thesis or hook?

As the reviewer, you may wish to even lead into the review with your own summation of the narrative hook…without spoiling the plot and its resolution, of course! Take for instance, Andrew Miller’s review of Jose Saramago’s novel, Blindness:

“Traffic at a red light. The lights change, the cars move off, all except one that remains blocking the middle lane. A man inside is shouting the same three words again and again: ‘I am blind.’ Distraught, he is accompanied to his home by a kindly stranger. But this good Samaritan is also a car thief. Having taken the blind man home, he steals his car. A short time later he too is blind.”

While Miller could have opened his review by saying, “Saramago’s novel is about a whole town that goes blind, save one person,” this opening is far more engaging and interesting.

Finally, you’ll need to consider:

-How well does the author write? Authors with a particularly unique narrative style might deserve special mention. I like Jennifer Egan’s description of Jim Harrison’s writing in her recent review of Harrison’s novel, The English Major:

“Jim Harrison’s writing is oddly mysterious. His prose style is plain, even flat. His sentences unspool casually, and are often comma-free to the point of sounding almost hapless.”

The reader of Egan’s review is preparing for a withering commentary about Harrison’s novel.

And then, she makes an abrupt turn:

“Yet they fuse on the page with a power and a blunt beauty whose mechanics are difficult to trace even when you look closely.”

Egan goes on to call Harrison’s writing style a “straw-to-gold technique” that characterizes his work. Egan isn’t just sharing her opinion about Harrison’s writing; she’s helping the reader of her review to approach Harrison’s style and access it in a new way.

Miller’s review of Saramago’s novel is similarly adept at preparing the reader for Saramago’s inimitable style–one which is often frustrating to readers new to the Portuguese writer’s work. Miller wrote:

“The prose, with its minimal punctuation, its flickering of tense and subject so that we glide between first and third person, between stream of consciousness and wry objectivity… takes a page or two for the reader to settle into…; the denseness of the long polyphonic paragraphs appears slightly daunting at the first encounter. Soon, however, we are caught up by the sheer momentum of the narrative. The unencumbered language hurries us forward at such a pace it is difficult to do justice to the subtlety and occasional beauty of its architecture, as if we were driving headlong through a great city at night.”

Miller’s review is almost as lyrical as Saramago’s novel, and if I hadn’t read it already, I’d be headed off to the library to check it out.

Does the book review ultimately reflect the reviewer’s own literary preferences and prejudices? Of course. But by paying attention to these basic criteria, you have a point of departure for your reviews, and a set of standards to which your readers can hold you, just as you have done with the author whose work you’re reviewing.

Now get reading!

Photo: swiv (Flickr creative commons)

I’m what tech analysts and marketers call a “late adopter.”

For months, I resisted opening Facebook and Twitter accounts– another user ID? Another password? Another site to remember to visit, to keep updated?

No thanks.

But then, I gave in.

As I began to participate in both of these virtual social networks, I noticed friends and acquaintances simultaneously using the services while questioning their value. They wrote about the corrosive effect they believed Facebook and Twitter might have over the long run, worried that online social sites will replace “meaningful” communication with sound bytes and only increase our dependence upon computers. Wasn’t knowing what was on friends’ minds at the second they happened to update their status a bit banal?

But as people I hadn’t heard from in 10 years or more started to “friend” me on Facebook, I began to think that I couldn’t disagree more with the arguments against Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter made finding people and reconnecting with them effortless, doing the work of tracking down old friends for me by searching my e-mail, my past employment, and schools attended for contacts.

What was more important, though, was exactly what some critics bemoaned: access to the utterly mundane details of friends’ lives. Though I’m not intrigued by the fact that a friend has just finished a load of laundry or gotten home from work, I’ve learned things about close friends and acquaintances that I’d never known and which can make our relationships richer. “Listening to Silvio Rodriguez,” one friend wrote just today. Who knew? I love Silvio Rodriguez, too.

“Family coming to visit this weekend,” wrote a dear friend who I’d lost touch with. “Say hi!” I wrote back, thinking how long it’s been since I’ve seen his mom.

“Baking a cake,” wrote an acquaintance who I’d never known possessed a penchant for cooking.

It’s precisely these details that I do want to know about my friends, whose lives are unfolding far from my own, and with people I don’t know. The most quotidian details of our daily lives are what count, and they’re precisely what we miss in e-mails, written letters, and phone calls, where we struggle to figure out where to pick up the threads of our relationships across the time and space that separate us. After a few earnest efforts, the thread grows slack again. We think we’ve got nothing left to say. We think the people we once thought would be friends forever don’t care much, now, about whether we’ve learned to bake, what music fills our ears, who we’re spending the weekend with.

Best friends from school days move in different circles, have totally different careers, have grown–just as I have–into different people with the same sweet and true core. I could be sad that I hardly know them, or I could be fascinated and excited about the people we’ve all become. Facebook and Twitter let me be the latter.

Photo: litlnemo (Flickr creative commons)

If you’re a writer intending to publish your work, you will eventually need to develop research skills. Even the most beautiful, deft narrative pieces occasionally require the information and insight that only research can provide.

The Internet has made research easier than ever, providing information that’s no farther away than a keystroke or click of the mouse. But as an editor of two very different types of writing–academic and travel-related–I can confirm that the Internet also raises some serious concerns about its use for research purposes, regardless of the genre.

The concerns can be sorted into two main categories. First, there’s the problem of accuracy and reliability. Where are you getting your information? Where did your source get its information? How dated is the information, and is it possible for you to corroborate your findings? Are you checking multiple sources? And if so, how are you reconciling divergent facts? For instance, while working on an article about Juan Antonio Picasso last week, Francisco wanted to verify the date when Pablo Picasso’s grandfather arrived in Cuba. One source indicated 1846. Another reported the date as 1848. Still another gave a different year. Which source was right?

Second is the issue of legitimacy. What makes an Internet site legitimate? Wikipedia has become wildly popular as a source of information for writers in a variety of genres. While the site can provide a quick overview that gives you background information about a topic, Wikipedia is not a legitimate source. First, the pages are written by people you can’t identify and whose credentials are not substantiated. Second, the “sources” cited in Wikipedia articles are not always legitimate themselves. There’s primary research information and secondary research information. And then there’s tertiary research… and Wikipedia falls into that category.

So where and how does a writer begin to research a subject?

The answers to this question will depend upon the subject of your piece, the publication in which you’re aiming to place it, and your intended audience. The general tips and resources I provide here, though, are useful for many writing projects and should be added to your mental or electronic library.

-The Library of Congress: The bricks-and-mortar library has long been a place where academic researchers have ensconced themselves amongst stacks of books, documents, photographs, and other archival material. But you don’t need to visit Washington, D.C. to take advantage of the vast, impressive collection of the Library of Congress. An incredible amount of the LoC’s holdings have been digitized and are available–for free–online. You can even set up your own personalized virtual archive here.

If you’re doing historical research, American or otherwise, the LoC’s website is an excellent starting place for accessing primary source material.

-Questia: Questia is a virtual library with an extensive collection of full-text scholarly texts, journal articles, and magazine and newspaper articles on thousands of subjects, including history, business, social science, politics, and much more. All of the material is in English. While the service isn’t free–it’s membership based–writers who need to conduct research regularly will find Questia worthwhile.

-New York Public Library Database: The NYPL has 94 databases you can search from home… if you have a library card. If you don’t, reach out to an NYC friend and see if they might help you out. Database subjects range from the broad and comprehensive EBSCOhost (full-text journal and newspaper articles) to more subject-specific collections, including African American History, American Indian History, and the AP Multimedia Archive. There’s a database of 150 Chinese language journals and at least three Spanish language databases.

-Google Books: What Google lacks in design appeal, it more than makes up for in functionality and utility. When researching, don’t just Google; check Google Books, which offers both full-text and limited preview editions of popular and scholarly texts.

-Twitter and Lonely Planet Thorn Tree Forums: Looking for information or opinions about a place from people who know it well? Travel writers, in particular, are using Twitter and other online forums and social networks, to survey other users, to line up interviews, or to search for contacts and information. These online communities can definitely expand the reach of your research.

What resources do you use when conducting research? Share your tips below!

Photo: andercismo
(Flickr creative commons)