Criticism & Features

NBCC Reads

What Are You Recommending, James Polk?

By NBCC

LAST week, the NBCC launched a Best Recommended List, drawn from the votes of our members and over a hundred former finalists and winners of our award. (For more on that go here). One of the voters was critic James Polk. Here's what he had to say about the title he voted for.

“The Art of Political Murder” operates at a bloody Guatemalan junction where justice and injustice interact, assembling a truth from the scattered shards of memory and deliberate distortion, corruption and courage, until the gruesome story of a bloody crime with official overtones and its tangled aftermath come clear. Along the way, Goldman digs deep into the human soul and what he finds there is at once triumphant and chilling, a provocative insight into the myriad of ways people react to life-threatening stress.

–James Polk teaches literature at Marist College in Poughkeepsie.