Books

Book Review: “At the Vanguard of Vinyl” — Illuminating and Frustrating

April 28, 2024
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Other readers may be more sympathetic to this informative book’s broader conclusions about the rise of LP’s and the “erasure of black bodies and black aesthetics.

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Book Review: “Get Off My Neck” — How the Judicial System Works, From a Former Insider

April 27, 2024
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Many of the circumstances and particular cases Debbie Hines discusses in “Get Off My Neck” are grim, even sickening. But her experience in the American justice system has taught Hines to choose hope and struggle over despair. And that is encouraging.

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Book Review: Maya Arad’s “The Hebrew Teacher” — Balancing Conflict and Compassion

April 24, 2024
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This disturbing and beautiful book concerns itself mostly with Israelis living in America, and Maya Arad has brought her characters and their stories to life in meaningful and unforgettable ways.

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Poetry Review: “Catullus: Selected Poems” — A Comfortable Intro to an Uncomfortable Poet

April 24, 2024
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Translator Stephen Mitchell serves Catullus best with the poems that don’t demand cleverness, where the sentiment is at least seemingly direct.

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Book Review: “Out of Left Field: A Sportswriter’s Last Word” — Better Than Being an Accountant

April 24, 2024
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Throughout “Out of Left Field,” Stan Isaacs revisits events he covered decades earlier, some of them as significant as the World Series, some of them as silly as frog jumping.

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Children’s Book Reviews: Finding Connections — Three Picture Books for Kids

April 22, 2024
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A trio of picture books about people establishing nurturing links.

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Book Review: “Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir” — A Rehash

April 21, 2024
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The best part of the Silver/Ursini book is the padding, the last forty pages in which the two authors go past “Double Indemnity”‘s release to contextualize it within the generic stream of “film noir”.

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Children’s Book Reviews: Gardens Galore!

April 18, 2024
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Get ready for spring with these children’s picture books.

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Book Review: “Witness: An Insider’s Narrative of the Carceral State” — A Voice Worth Heeding

April 17, 2024
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Lyle C. May reminds us that large numbers of men sentenced to death have been exonerated, and that at every level the apparatus of the carceral state is erratic at best and dramatically biased against minorities and the poor.

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Book Review: “Hollywood’s Imperial Wars” — Darkness Visible

April 16, 2024
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“Hollywood’s Imperial Wars” is at its best as a bold and informative survey of the movies that the studios felt it was “credibly possible” for them to make after Vietnam.

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