Tom Connolly
Oliver Hilmes’s “Summer of Freedom” offers vivid snapshots of 1945—but little sense of why the world changed.
Marjorie Garber’s case for poetry as resistance proves more fanciful than persuasive.
Why democracy cannot escape elites—and how they quietly reshape power from within.
The smoke drifting over the set is a metaphor for the mind-fogging rhetoric of Willy Loman’s phony boosterism. He has been adrift in an American dream that was a lie all along.
The book argues, convincingly, that Sid Caesar’s genius wasn’t in what he did or said so much as in the anarchistic energy he encouraged his writers to unleash and harness.
Kathleen Spaltro’s biography of Ethel Barrymore briskly traces her mythic career but brings to life neither the woman nor her theatre.
Jennifer Ann Redmond’s sympathetic approach to Diana Barrymore’s disastrous life is valuable because it rejects the poor-little-rich-girl tropes. She was more than a debauched debutante or fallen starlet.
The political and moral consequences of the Compromise of 1850 continue to be debated, but Peter Charles Hoffer’s book offers valuable lessons on how concession and consensus once served as pillars of the Republic.
Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s towering achievement is to show that, while Nicholas II was betrayed, he lost his throne because he had made it impossible for anyone who loved Russia to be loyal to him.
Cultural Commentary: Death by Incorporation — Why Do Bean-Counters Run Arts Boards?
When corporate thinking dominates cultural institutions, the art often pays the price.
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