Books

Book Review: Justice Denied? Or “Justice Abandoned”?

March 4, 2025
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In “Justice Abandoned”, Rachel Elise Barkow argues that much of the blame for the blight of American mass incarceration lies with the Supreme Court.

Poetry Review: Songs from a Bone Window — Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s “After the Operation”

March 3, 2025
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For poet Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., the neurological is also archeological.

Book Review: Catching Up with Minor White’s Off-Beat Journal

March 3, 2025
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Minor White’s autobiographical undertaking lacks diaristic narrative. There’s too much neurotic navel-gazing too much of the time. Yet it is very appealing as a twisted personal miscellany whose contents range from summaries of sex dreams to snarky letters that were never sent.

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.

Children’s Book Reviews: Celebrating Blackness

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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