Books
By Bill Marx Somewhere an enterprising graduate student is working on a trenchant study of the correlation between holiday stage entertainment and the American economy. When things were looking bright and profitable the shows became cynical and comic, with mischievous elves placing whoopee cushions under our delusions of good cheer. Now that unemployment is high…
Read Moreby Bill Marx The Boston Book Festival, which kicks off its existence this Saturday, is an inevitability that for some puzzling reason wasn’t a reality. Boston is a determinedly readerish town, yet it is the only one of America’s major cities that doesn’t have a book festival. Thankfully, BBF organizer Deborah Z. Porter remedies the…
Read MoreWhen discussing Friedrich Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from a damning portrayal. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt. Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32. Reviewed by Harvey Blume Among the most memorable words Karl…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
Read MoreThe governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
Read MoreAuthor Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.” Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95. Reviewed by Mark Nolan…
Read MoreActors From the London Stage (AFTLS) proves that when it comes to the Bard the minimal may be maximal. Reviewed by Caldwell Titcomb Shakespeare’s challenging “King Lear” is the vehicle for this year’s fall tour of the troupe called Actors From the London Stage (AFTLS). This project was begun in 1975, and has been flourishing…
Read MoreBy Helen Epstein A friend of mine who used to teach at Harvard says, “the place is filled with pompous people who think they have to be the smartest and most sophisticated in the world — at least in their field,” so it was a delight this afternoon to hear the unpretentious and visibly agitated…
Read MoreBy Caldwell Titcomb There are those who have proclaimed that Christopher Plummer is the greatest classical actor in North America. There is certainly no gainsaying that he has for some time been in the tiny group at the top of the acting profession. Now as he nears the age of 80 he has brought forth…
Read MoreMostly, Richard Polsky writes entertainingly about the art world in the American vernacular: cash. i sold Andy Warhol. (too soon) by Richard Polsky. other press, 288 pages, $23.95. Reviewed by Peter Walsh “The nature of the art business is that it’s filled with pettiness and jealousy…” complains art dealer Richard Polsky early in his new…
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