Books

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.

Book Review: “In Certain Circles” and “The Last Lover” — The Powerful and The Disappointing

September 22, 2014
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Elizabeth Harrower’s In Certain Circles is a stunning novel about class and marriage and power; Can Xue’s The Last Lover is a tedious surrealistic farce.

Books Interview: Heather Cox Richardson on the History of the Republican Party — Going Full Circle

September 22, 2014
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In this book, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson explores the (d)evolution of the Republican Party from its founding in 1854 through the presidency of George W. Bush.

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