Last week, just a month after the publication of Loot in the US, the Met in New York announced that it was returning two Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.
Books
Book Review: “What You Can See From Here” – Hopefully Romantic
There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.
Book Review: “Broadway Goes to War — American Theater during World War II”
For many dramatists, the label of ‘leftism’ was not pejorative: it was about fighting for human decency and political reform.
Book Review: “Seeing Sideways” — Parenting on the Edge
Those who have followed Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh’s career over the past three decades are the target audience for this memoir. But she is a good enough writer to interest people who may never have listened to her music.
Book Review: “Refugee: A Memoir” — A Powerful Story of the Plight of Millions
Refugee: A Memoir was not written to entertain but to outrage and activate.
Book Review: “Hard Like Water” — The Revolution Will Be Eroticized
There is no gainsaying that Hard Like Water is, in English, an important book, if only because of its refreshingly sensual vision of the appeal of the Cultural Revolution.
June Short Fuses – Materia Critica
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Book Review: “Warhol” — Pop Art’s Timeless Impresario
Accessible to the art-loving novice, Blake Gopnik’s Warhol suggests that his subject’s marketing genius doesn’t have a time limit.
Book Review: “The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne” — Ireland’s Unlikable Joan of Arc
“What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?”
Book Review: “A Place Like Mississippi” — The Home of a Sophisticated Multiracial Literary Culture
Literate people in the state will be familiar with this story, but it may come as a revelation to those whose Mississippi is limited to a cultural Bermuda Triangle on whose sharp angles sit William Faulkner, John Grisham, and Oprah Winfrey.