Books
Jack Taylor has always been a version of the reluctant detective, but now he seems more impotent than ever — distracted, beat down, and very tired.
Frolic and Detour contains a few poems that I judge to be instant classics of English-language poetry.
This is a brilliant book that comes at a propitious time in our country’s history.
Biographer James Kaplan was aided by the assistance of Irving Berlin’s two elder daughters, and that makes this biography particularly valuable.
Because Eliza Griswold’s poems often take place in war zones, she’s always provocative — even when she is tendentious.
When someone recommended to Steven Hassan he write a volume called The Cult of Trump, “it just seemed like the most important book I could write, frankly.”
Two recent biographies take very different approaches as they revel in the wild lives and examine the distinctive songs of two of rock music’s most enigmatic figures: Lou Reed and Warren Zevon.
“You can read Frederick Douglass forever and still just encounter new things, new ideas, new passages, new phrases. He’s that kind of writer. It’s like reading Emerson or even Shakespeare.”
Virginie Despentes novel reads like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia mashed with Don Quixote and set in contemporary Paris.
About the post-Reagan era, Boston Phoenix and Boston After Dark editor, Arnie Reisman, observes: “Everything went to sleep, and while we were sleeping, the Republican Party grew six more heads.”
Arts Remembrance: Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s ‘Saxophone Colossus,’ Dies at 95