Tom Connolly
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.
Lutz Seiler’s novel is part of the post-reunification literature landscape, in this case a brilliant exploration of the personal and political viewed through the consciousness of a pensively bedeviled protagonist.
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