Books
Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America by Jay Atkinson, Wiley and Sons, 250 pages, $25.95 Reviewed By Nancye Tuttle I’m ready to pack my bag and hit the road. But it isn’t Jack Kerouac’s iconic 1957 novel On the Road that’s fueling my wanderlust. It’s Jay Atkinson’s compelling, new memoir…
Read MoreAugust: Osage County by Tracy Letts. Directed by Anna D. Shapiro. The Steppenwolf Theatre Company production presented by Broadway Across America at the Colonial Theatre, Boston, MA, though May 9. Reviewed by Bill Marx “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” opined Leo Tolstoy sagely in Anna…
Read MoreReaders should not be put off by the title, for this is a splendid novel, interesting in the risks it takes, in its ambition and scope—a book that deserves to be savored and discussed. Rat by Fernanda Eberstadt, Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95 Reviewed by Roberta Silman They have always been with us, those “casual offspring,”…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx I have neglected to point out the recent postings at my other gig, the online feature World Books at BBC/PRI’s The World. I just completed my April podcast, a departure for the series because I focus on a classic American author rather than a writer in translation. But this April 21st marks…
Read MoreThe major problem with these treatments of Timothy Leary and Daniel Ellsberg is that they portray their main characters as if there was no possible resonance between them, as if they came from different eras. The Harvard Psychedelic Club, by Don Lattin, HarperOne, 256 pages, $24.99. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx Critic Debra Cash’s excellent writings on dance can be found on The Arts Fuse. She has new book of poetry out, timed perfectly for the upcoming Jewish holiday. The lyrics in the volume Who Knows One are “based on stories, language, and associations connected to the Passover Haggadah.” Those who have admired…
Read MoreAlthough the memoir has been called luminous, wise, humble, piercing, and all sorts of other laudatory adjectives, it is, nevertheless, not an easy book to read because you keep wondering how you would manage in this situation. Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt, Ecco Press, 166 pages, $21.00 Reviewed by Roberta Silman At the end of…
Read MoreArtists should “no longer huddle in the confines of a painted box set” but instead join together to “find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time” and dramatize “the search of the average American today for knowledge about his country and his world.” – Hallie Flanagan, Federal Theatre Project Stick…
Read More