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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 21/10/2026

Here's Rebecca Ackermann with your new morning affirmation

"My daughter is not a cow or a coyote, but make no mistake, a child is a creature. Caring for one over hours and years can feel like communing—and wrestling—with the natural world if you’re paying attention. And now I am. When I think I just can’t wash another dish or do another bedtime, when I start to feel sorry for my solo self holding my child’s feelings and teaching her to take them back, when I worry what future I’m even preparing her for and why invisible powers condemn her generation to their own apocalypse, The Wall reminds me that 'the troublesome business' of care is what living is. The ease that the billboards promise is an artificial analgesic, not a balm. Effort is natural; caring almost more than we can bear is what heals. (Even and maybe especially if it can’t stop loss from coming, in the book and in life.)"

Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 06/10/2026

We have monthly happy hours! The next one is tomorrow, at Portal at 4. (If you go to our website, it always tells you when the next happy hour will be)

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 02/10/2026

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the starting point for @meganwachspress.bsky.social's article here was that The New York Times article was simplistic and overlooked important complexities in favor of the story they wanted or were willing to tell. This outcome really underscores that.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 27/09/2026

scenes from behind the orb: your sunday reading being compiled by firelight with literal actual coyotes howling in the background, during a rare away game in Marin.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 18/09/2026

Why, yes, actually, we did have some more thoughts about Eli's closing. We shared them with the West Bay Chronicle, in fact:

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 09/09/2026

"Altman and Musk had been friends and allies brought together, precisely, by the concern that AI would destroy the world": www.oaklandreviewofbooks.org/more-and-mor...

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 08/09/2026

Come and buy one of those hats you’ve been seeing around town.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 05/09/2026

Friday night vibes at the museum, confirmed, excellent

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 01/09/2026

Belatedly: From "The Heart of Rock & Soul." Among the best 800 words of pop music criticism ever written.

149
SOLDIER BOY, The Shirelles
Produced by Luther Dixon; Written by Luther Dixon and
Florence Green
Scepter 1228
1962
Billboard: #1 (3 weeks)
Down at the bus stop you'd see them every morning, books clutched to their car coats, high-rise bouffants frosted in the early chill, wearing too much makeup and already, at fifteen or sixteen, a few too many pounds. I did not know their names and you can be certain they didn't

know mine. These weren't girls who paid attention to guys their own age; they'd given up on scoring with the jocks or any of the inside crowd and the rest of us were, well, not worth so much as a glance.
Not because they were snobs; because they teared the names that
"smart kids" would call them, which began and ended in the catchall designation, "slut."
So I'll never know for certain if the scraps of conversation you'd pick up from sitting near them told the whole story, or whether i's really fair to fill in many details. But if you watched and listened, you heard stories that implied an experience no guy of my acquaintance could have boasted, a matter-of-fact knowingness about sex and men and the world at large that the college-bound among us didn't yet suspect. These girls might as well already have been women, because their lives were already laid out for them around a narrow set of alternatives: hasty postgraduation marriage and too many pregnancies too soon or else a job at Kroger's or wherever else they needed a checkout clerk, some job you might be able to get without even a diploma.
Or getting knocked up and having the guy ditch her. Or getting knocked up and deciding to have a still-illegal abortion with the risk of being ruined or killed

Living in those mid-America tank towns back then, you knew all sorts of stories like those, just like you knew the stories of their boy-friends, including the one summed up in that line that goes zipping by in "Born in the U.S.A.": "Got in a little hometown jam, so they put a rifle in my hand." Off they went, and after a while, you began to notice that not all of them came back. But mostly they did, and while it would be obscene to argue that that was worse, it would be unfair to exaggerate how much.
By the time they were juniors, maybe a little earlier, certainly before they graduated, a lot of those bouffant girls at the bus stop would have boyfriends serving somewhere overseas, most likely in Germany or a quiescent Korea, where bullets did not fly but nights were long and temptations many. Because the barriers between us were huge, Im guessing again, but maybe they were just devoted pen pals, not doing so well in the high school social scene and so transferring their need to be needed to more distant objects. A lot of these same girls were the first to catch on to the Beatles, and the first to go really mad for one or another of the guys, the ultimate sexual unobtainables. Some of them had already figured that game out before the British Invasion, and they were the most loyal fans of local rock groups, often better ones than the style-setters at school listened to.
But sometimes, I suspect, those girls had real relationships with guys "in the service," not just paper ones, and their lonely nights must

have been especially bereft because it was hard enough to land a guy, let alone worry about his existence a continent and an ocean away.
Reputations are easy to come by and hard to get rid of, especially in your own mind. And so (I'm guessing again) they fretted.
I mention all this because everything I've ever read about "Soldier Boy" treats its enormous popularity as a mystery. Written on the spot in the studio and recorded in the final few minutes of a session, it strikes other critics and historians as perfunctory and tossed off, its unison harmonies and the unison instrumental break shared by organ and guitar insufficiently elaborated.
But whenever I've heard "Soldier Boy," it's made me think of those girls and their boyfriends, each of them lost and confused in a world that they not only didn't understand very well but which manifestly did not like them. And so they found each other, and so they were dragged apart, and so they wondered and pledged and pleaded: "In this whole world, you can love but one girl / Let me be that one girl / For I'll be true to you."
Somehow, in a barracks or a bedroom, those sweetly voiced lines must have helped a few million heads lay more comfortably upon their pillows. And so there's no mystery at all, really, except how so many people can stand right before our eyes and not be seen. Or heard.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 23/08/2026

We have hats now! Come to an event or drop us a line if you want one.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 21/08/2026

Would anyone like a giant pile of extremely inessential books? the winner of our "winner take all" contest refused to take all of them, which, ok, fair. We did, however, destroy "the art of not giving a fuck"

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 15/08/2026

ORB will be in several sessions at the Bathers Summet Symposium this year: batherslibrary.cargo.site/summer-sympo...

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 08/08/2026

Nextdoor has discovered that we exist and is not into it

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 26/07/2026

Nate Adams, who's running as a Democratic Socialist for Oakland City Council mentioned that ring of flock cameras around Piedmont that we might have been the first to tell you about:

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 23/07/2026

See you at The Aloha Club today, from 4 until whatever time after 4 when everyone leaves! You may have heard the rumors that we have free books and merch; the rumors are true.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 11/07/2026

Yeah, we went there. I mean SOMEONE had to.

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 22/06/2026

That is a real thing we saw in Oakland. This is not. Broadway and 14th have changed!

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Oakland Review of Books @oaklandreviewofbooks.org · 22/06/2026

It is important to note two facts about this Little Free Library on 55th, just west of the freeway: 1. There are 23 books by John D. MacDonald. 2. The erotic coloring book has had one (1) page colored.