Books

Children’s Book Reviews: Classics — New and Reissued

January 20, 2026
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Enjoy an instant classic for kids and an established classic that is newly available.

Book Review: Medicine, Morality, and the Women of “The Double Standard Sporting House”

January 17, 2026
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For those ready to make the investment, “The Double Standard Sporting House” is a fascinating look inside a complex and compelling world.

Book Review: Imagining a World Beyond Prisons — Anna Terwiel’s “Prison Abolition for Realists”

January 14, 2026
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“Prison Abolition For Realists” makes a strong case for persevering in a contest that will probably take a long time to win.

Book Review: Trapped in the Present Tense — The Bleak Masculinity of David Szalay’s “Flesh”

January 11, 2026
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David Szalay’s novel focuses on a current type of western male: one whose emotional growth and adult development are stunted or limited by his inability to express himself and understand who he is.

Book Review: Blonde Ambition in Postwar Britain: Lynda Nead’s “British Blonde” and the Performance of Desire

January 9, 2026
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Lynda Nead’s meticulous, competent, and impressively researched approach gives the work weight without making it ponderous; “British Blonde” seems destined to serve as a text for classes in gender or cultural studies. 

Book Review: “The Musical Lives of Charles Manson” — Scenes from a Counterculture

January 9, 2026
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Nicholas Tochka is less interested in crafting a coherent portrayal of Charles Manson’s “musical lives” than in connecting his critical hypothesis of “the invention of the Sixties” to critical theories.

Book Review: Choreographer George Balanchine — Cavalier or Creep?

January 8, 2026
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“Balanchine Finds His America” is written primarily in the present tense, so that reading the book is like watching a never-to-be-repeated dance performance.

Book Review: Art, Desire, and Danger in Olivia Laing’s “The Silver Book”

January 3, 2026
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Olivia Laing’s hard-driven narrative, set mostly in 1975, combines a gay romance with a literary text about the dangers of resurfacing fascism, a discourse on 20th-century avant-garde film-making, and a political thriller.

Poetry Review: “Sky of Sudden Changes” — In Living Color

January 3, 2026
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Many of the poems in this new collection take in the world through a distinctively painterly eye for scenes and sketches.

Book Review: “Call Me Ishmaelle” — Was This Reboot Necessary?

December 29, 2025
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Applying a litmus test to art — in this case ideological sanitizing — inevitably diminishes the art.

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