Month: August 2009
by Helen Epstein Go here for information about a live-chat, scheduled for August 23rd, with Helen Epstein on “The Art of Narrative Writing.” HE: How did this situation evolve? JK: The basic facts are in the “NY Times” story. Yale University told the press to remove the illustrations: first the cartoons, then a second illustration,…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume In an interview I did with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in 1997 (for the now defunct “Boston Book Review”), we talked, naturally enough, about the issue of race in America, and about Gates’s sense of mission, as scholar and writer, in relationship to it. One thing in particular that he said sheds…
Read MoreCan you imagine a scholarly press publishing a book about the Mona Lisa without a reproduction of the painting? Or, perhaps a more pertinent example, a book about anti-Semitic stereotypes without an illustration of them? Brandeis professor and author Jytte Klausen was asked to sign what she called a “gag order” by Yale University Press.…
Read Moreby Helen Epstein Go here for information about a live-chat, scheduled for August 23rd, with Helen Epstein on “The Art of Narrative Writing.” Despite what the NYTimes thinks Meryl Streep cooks up a storm in “Julie and Julia.” I usually trust the Times‘ A. O. Scott on movies, but this time I don’t share his…
Read Moreby Helen Epstein Go here for information about a live-chat, scheduled for August 23rd, with Helen Epstein on “The Art of Narrative Writing.” If you’re at all interested in popular culture, don’t miss Aviva Kempner’s new documentary “Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg.” Kempner is the D.C.-based director of the award-winning documentary “Life and Times of Hank Greenberg”…
Read MoreLike many devotees of Shakespeare & Company, I’ve long been an admirer of Tod Randolph, who over the last thirteen years in the Berkshires has given indelible and exceptionally intelligent performances of such Shakespearean roles as Desdemona and Portia. Miriam Hyman (Donna) and John Douglas Thompson (Dad) in “The Dreamer Examines his Pillow” at Shakespeare…
Read MoreVisiting the Frelinghuysen Morris House in Lenox got me thinking about modernist architecture in the eastern part of Massachusetts where Walter Gropius landed as part of the great exodus of “degenerate” artists, scientists, writers and other intellectuals who fled to America from Nazi Germany in the years before the second world war. by Helen Epstein…
Read MoreA most rewarding rainy day activity this rainy summer is a visit to one of the artists’ homes in the Berkshires, many of which are now part of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. By Helen Epstein Exterior of the Frelinghuysen-Morris House & Studio, circa 1940. Edith Wharton’s The Mount, Daniel Chester French’s Chesterwood, and…
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