Books

Book Review: “Queer Moderns” – Party On, Max!

May 29, 2025
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Max Ewing is little known today, but this book celebrates him as a sexually nonconforming bachelor who strove to impress the quirkiest bohemian clique of the Roaring ’20s.

Book Review: Life in a State of Sparkle — The Writings of David Shapiro

May 23, 2025
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While David Shapiro’s criticism is audacious, his interviews are self-deprecating and offbeat, filled with surprising reveals.

Book Review: Gene Krupa –“Master of the Drums”

May 22, 2025
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Chronicling Gene Krupa’s ups and downs and registering his impact on contemporary music, Master of the Drums is a well-deserved account of one of the key musical artists of the past century.

Book Review: “The Director” — To Collaborate or Not to Collaborate, That Is the Question

May 14, 2025
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This wake-up call — what will artists be asked to do to please the powers-that-be? — is also a good read.

Book Review: “Horace: Poet on a Volcano” — A Writer Who Advised We Live Life to the Max

May 13, 2025
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Horace advocated that seizing the immediate with existential zest.

Book Review: “A Precise Chaos” — The Omnipresence of Change

May 12, 2025
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“A Precise Chaos” examines, with profundity, intricate human patterns of memory, history, and love, where the personal and the political intertwine and nothing ends cleanly because nothing is ever entirely lost.

Poetry Review: Eyes Like a Horse — Thomas O’Grady “Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems”

May 10, 2025
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You could say that Thomas O’Grady’s poems have the eyes of a horse — channeling history and mythology through the contemporary lens of poetry’s eternal present.

Children’s Book Reviews: Different Endings

May 7, 2025
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Two new picture books offer a refreshing use of not-so-typical endings.

Book Review: “Josephine Baker’s Secret War” — Zouzou in Casablanca

May 4, 2025
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What we don’t learn in “Josephine Baker’s Secret War” was what she did to steel herself against the risks she was taking. Was it all acting? A belief that her charmed life would never end?

Book Review: “Sargent and Paris” — Sargent and Amnesia

April 29, 2025
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I wish this catalogue spelled out John Singer Sargent’s professional stance as a “juste milieu” painter more methodically. That term refers to those eager to be associated with new stylistic tendencies yet careful not to transgress the establishment’s norms.

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