Books

Book Review: “Banal Nightmare” — A Smart Lampoon of the White and the Privileged

February 28, 2025
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Although novelist Halle Butler portrays the lives of millennial women (and men) as unhappy, anxious, and stressed, she does so in a highly entertaining way.

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Children’s Book Reviews: Celebrating Blackness

February 25, 2025
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Three engaging and spirited books celebrate Black history, culture, and resilience.

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Book Reviews: Three Very Different Architecture Books

February 21, 2025
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A trio of reviews of volumes on structures on paper and in the world.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Book Review: “Fine” — Lad Lit That’s Keenly Aware of the Human Condition and Its Afflictions

February 14, 2025
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John Patrick Higgins is a deft writer whose prose often displays a spare lyricism. 

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Book Review: “John Lewis: A Life” — A Sense of Intimacy

February 13, 2025
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David Greenberg has brought to life not only one unusual man but also the tumultuous racial history of our country in the second half of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century.

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Book Review: “Making No Compromise” — The Story of the “Little Review” That Could

February 8, 2025
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The book continually underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons.

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