Books

Book Review: “Room on the Sea” — Low Tide

June 24, 2025
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“Room on the Sea” is impressively crafted and written, but its lack of bite, drive, and action left me restless. 

Book Review: “A Remarkable Man” — Surviving the Unthinkable

June 24, 2025
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Still, even with its flaws, this short book is an important contribution to literature by and about atomic bomb survivors because it underlines their indispensable value as witnesses.

Book Review: “The War of Art” — Waging Creative Defiance

June 19, 2025
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The book provides ample proof that activist artists, when determined, can use their work to influence our thinking in positive ways, and effect change.

Poetry Commentary: Antigone Kefala — Voice from Another Shore

June 10, 2025
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Like her sisters in the art of crystalline complexity, Australian poet and novelist Antigone Kefala persevered through years of isolation, obscurity, and critical neglect.

Book Review: “Émile Zola: A Determined Life” — Naturalist, Reformer, Visionary

June 7, 2025
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What our planet needs now is the reincarnation of a writer who, while combing through the nooks and crannies of society for painful truths, uses depictions of the present to demand future changes.

Poetry Reviews: A Roundup of New Volumes from New Orleans Poets

June 5, 2025
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Let’s look at a fresh crop of collections by poets who are either born and raised or have made their homes in NOLA, stopping to admire the architecture and the scope, the heft and the breadth of their lines.

Book Review: “Matisse in Morocco” — A Masterful Study of One of Most Radical Painters of the 20th Century

June 3, 2025
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“Matisse in Morocco” is a 35-year labor of love, as meticulously researched as a Ph.D. thesis but without the turgid language, as charmingly composed as the travelogues of Goethe, and with characters worthy of Balzac.

Book Review: “The Fuck Business” – Chronicling Sex Workers on the Clock

June 3, 2025
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Here’s a look at the – pardon the expression – ins and outs of a very specialized industry, a story about coming of age in Boston’s long-gone Combat Zone.

Book Review: “Melting Point” — Promises, Promises

June 1, 2025
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After discarding a conventional draft — lots of explanatory narration from the author as a book’s omniscient narrator — Rachel Cockerell decided instead to create the book entirely as a collage of fragments from the historical record.

Children’s Book Reviews: Cats and Dogs and Babies

May 31, 2025
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This trio of preschool books celebrates new babies, new siblings — and cat lovers.

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