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Jazz Album Review: Exactly on Time — Kenny Wheeler Legacy’s “Some Days Are Better: The Lost Scores”

February 19, 2025
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An excellent new album by the ad hoc ensemble Kenny Wheeler Legacy. It is impossible not to think of how the great trumpeter Kenny Wheeler would have sounded over these updated arrangements with such top-drawer musicians and excellent production.

Book Review: “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” — Into a New Clearing

February 18, 2025
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Besides giving us a multi-faceted portrait of Robert Frost that leaves the poet tantalizingly inscrutable, Adam Plunkett does what the best biographers of great writers do: send us back to the work with renewed curiosity and heightened appreciation.

Book Review: “Río Muerto” — The Abiding Strength of Humanity

February 17, 2025
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Among this novel’s merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances.

Book Review: “Just Beyond the Light” — Essential Heavy-Metal Lit

February 17, 2025
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There are similarities between Randall Blythe’s music and his prose; both acknowledge the inescapable turmoil, darkness, and tragedy that bedevils everyone.

Coming Attractions: February 16 through March 3 — What Will Light Your Fire

February 16, 2025
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Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.

Book Review: Surviving Stalin in “No Country For Love”

February 16, 2025
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In this compulsively readable novel, a Ukrainian Jewish woman does what she needs to survive in the nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Visual Arts Review: “The Art of Looking” — The Evolution of Harvard’s Art History Department

February 15, 2025
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The show may be a case of inside baseball, appealing to a small group of art history majors and museum lovers. But it offers a fascinating look at innovation at one of the country’s most revered, and most traditional, colleges.

Film Review: “Captain America: Brave New World” – ‘Tis New to Thee?

February 14, 2025
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“Captain America: Brave New World,” which is loaded with potential for drama and commentary, has less weight and punch than a butterfly’s fart.

Film Review: “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” — Cheesy But Satisfying

February 14, 2025
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Yes, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is a cheesy, predictable rom-com. But it doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not.

Arts Commentary: Art, Music, and the New Age of Anxiety

February 14, 2025
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However late the hour and however long the road ahead, the cause of standing for justice, knowledge, and freedom isn’t yet doomed. Along the way, let the arts comfort, inspire, instruct, and help lead. That’s what they’re here for.

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