Books

Judicial Review #10: Discussing the Point of Elizabeth Graver’s “The End of the Point”

March 19, 2013
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What is a Judicial Review? It is a fresh approach to creating a conversational, critical space about the arts and culture. This session discusses Elizabeth Graver’s new novel The End of the Point, a multi-generational story about the trials and tribulations of a family that takes place between 1942 and 1999 in Ashaunt Point, a fictional beach community on Massachusetts’ seacoast.

Book Review: “Lost Battles” — Leonardo and Michelangelo Strut Their Stuff

March 17, 2013
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In some ways, Jonathan Jones’ narrative structure works against his strengths. Highly respected as a critic, he is an energetic and engaging writer and excels at what art historians call “close looking,” where he guides the reader line by line, brush stroke by brush stroke, through a work of art.

Book Review: A Powerful Remembrance of the Cambodian Genocide — “The Elimination”

March 11, 2013
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Ultimately, “The Elimination” is less a literary effort than an act of witness by both writer and reader.

Book Review: Roving Free Agents of the Imagination

February 25, 2013
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Autobiography, personal essay, history, current affairs, or literary criticism, many are the guises under which travel writing has seduced readers of decidedly categorical bent.

Book Review: Poet/Essayist Richard J. Fein — Yiddish as Mother Tongue and Lost Lover

February 22, 2013
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“The Beginning-End of Yiddish,” is poet/essayist Richard Fein’s core subject: his love for a language largely eviscerated in his lifetime.

Book Review: A Provocative Memoir about Growing up Gay in Japan

February 20, 2013
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American readers will be intrigued by a language for sexuality that is plain but understated, neither vulgar nor coy.

Book Review: A Remarkable “My Beloved World”

February 19, 2013
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This is not just a story of a plucky girl succeeding; in weaving her complicated story and giving credit to those who helped her to understand how to think critically and how to develop her own moral philosophy, Sonia Sotomayor never forgets that luck and serendipity also play a part.

Book Review: Bringing Nathaniel Hawthorne Home

February 18, 2013
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Unlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist — for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pieties than plummet into sheer nothingness.

Book Review: Guilty Pleasures? — Rocker Peter Hook Takes Us Inside Joy Division

February 13, 2013
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Peter Hook’s memoir contains no earthshattering revelations, but it does offer a new way (or at least another way) of thinking about the four young men who made up Joy Division.

Poetry Review: “The Briar Patch” — Crafty Poems, Accomplished and Sly

February 12, 2013
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Poems of concise and precise description and philosophy find their way among poems of memory and daily life, money, art, love, and the oddities in giving names. J. Kates’s technique is alive and various throughout.

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