Books
A trio of reviews of volumes on structures on paper and in the world.
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.
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.
There are similarities between Randall Blythe’s music and his prose; both acknowledge the inescapable turmoil, darkness, and tragedy that bedevils everyone.
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.
John Patrick Higgins is a deft writer whose prose often displays a spare lyricism.
David Greenberg has brought to life not only one unusual man but also the tumultuous racial history of our country in the second half of the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century.
The book continually underlines the important cultural role little magazines played, and how women were central to their existence as founders, editors, contributors, critics, and patrons.
This extraordinary cultural figure has yet to receive the biography she deserves.
At some point during the writing of the book, Ken Turan must have realized, sadly, that the Mayer/Thalberg/MGM story has been done to death. All he could do was what he did: tell well what had been told well before.
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