Books

Fuse Book Review: “The Bone Clocks” — Not Sufficiently Wound Up

October 10, 2014
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While The Bone Clocks is compulsively readable, there are too many parts of this book that can only be called lazy.

Book Review: “The fuzzy cinema of certain key events of my life” – Frankétienne’s “spiralist” novel “Ready to Burst”

October 6, 2014
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Ready to Burst is a compelling, intricately structured story told in resourceful, oft-poetic language by a influential Haitian poet and novelist.

Book Review: The Humanist Cinema of Taiwanese Director Hou Hsiao-hsien — Nothing But the Essential

October 5, 2014
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An exciting complement to the new book is a traveling retrospective of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films, a rare opportunity to see 19 of the director’s movies shown on 35mm film: at Cambridge’s Harvard Film Archive through November 2.

Book Review: Sanford Friedman’s Utterly Original “Conversations with Beethoven”

October 2, 2014
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How well Conversations with Beethoven works as fiction will depend on the engagement and imaginative powers of the reader.

Book Review: Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila” — A Vision of Life More Damned Than Redeemed

October 2, 2014
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Lila is an ambitious book that is deeply flawed and not nearly in the same class as Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead.

Book Review: “Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death” — A New Language for Living with Auschwitz

September 30, 2014
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Otto Dov Kulka’s exploration of the time he spent in Auschwitz as a child won the 2014 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize, one of the judges calling it “the greatest book on Auschwitz since Primo Levi.”

Book Interview: Jim Vrabel Explores Boston’s History from the Grassroots Perspective

September 28, 2014
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A People’s History of the New Boston takes the “grassroots” view and tries to give overdue credit to the role that community activists and neighborhood residents played in building the “New Boston.”

Book Review: “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” — An Ambitious and Disturbing Study of Injustice

September 27, 2014
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The Witch-Hunt Narrative is an extremely important book about an ongoing phenomenon that will not go away anytime soon.

Book Interview: Marion Elizabeth Rodgers on the Expanded “Days” of H. L. Mencken

September 25, 2014
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In The Days Trilogy, Expanded Edition, H. L. Mencken comes off as a marvelously mellowed master, his trademark savagery smoothed over, its energy focused on generating a pungently picturesque vision of a vanished America.

Book Review: Daniel Kehlmann’s “F” — An Amusing Look at Our Disjunctive Modern Life

September 24, 2014
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In F, vertigo is often palpable. Evil exists. “The terrifying beauty of things” does, too.

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