Books

Book Review: “Capital’s Grave” — We Need a Different System

March 17, 2025
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Staffed with billionaires including Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and Trump himself, a reputed billionaire, the present administration is made up of the country’s lords — and we are their serfs.

Book Review: “Kills Well With Others” — Another Mission for Aging Female Assassins

March 13, 2025
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Through it all, Deanna Raybourn’s quartet of females rely on the acuity and resourcefulness that has made the author’s other series characters both so memorable and beloved.

Poetry Review: Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” — The Joyful Weight of Words

March 12, 2025
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Ron Padgett’s “Pink Dust” proves that W.H. Auden was wrong — the nothing of poetry contains everything required to make a good (even heroic) life happen.

Book Review: “The Art of Inclusion” — A Volume of Tributes to Philly Bookseller Extraordinaire Larry Robin

March 11, 2025
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Larry Robin is to Philadelphia what Allen Ginsberg is to Paterson, New Jersey. In short, he is beloved, far and wide.

Book Reviews: The Fiction of Mikołaj Grynberg — Simultaneously Embracing the Tragic and the Comic

March 11, 2025
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Two astonishing books about the lives of Polish Jews who survived the Second World War or were born after the war.

Book Review: Peter Wolf’s “Waiting on the Moon” — A Captivating Memoir by Boston’s Own Zelig

March 10, 2025
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Timelines bounce a bit through the loosely organized, vignette-rooted book, where the back half casually weaves through a checklist of characters and tales not to be missed.

Book Review: Social Critic Jackson Lears Cheers the “Off-Modern”

March 7, 2025
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Jackson Lears’s collection of essays and book reviews gets a few things right in its description of various kooks, oddballs, and mavericks who sometimes succeeded in moving history in their direction. But it gets far more wrong.

Arts Remembrance: Tom Robbins’s “Joy in Spite of Everything”

March 5, 2025
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In his writing, in his life, and in his fun, generous, and winsomely wise spirit, the late — but never late for a party — Tom Robbins chose to feel “ridiculously fine” and wanted us to feel the same way.

Book Review: “Fable for the End of the World” — Techno-Fascism, Vividly Described

March 4, 2025
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“Fable for the End of the World” reflects our own uncertain condition — there are possibilities unknown, alternatives that even would-be godlings like Elon Musk and his ilk have not accounted for.

Book Review: Justice Denied? Or “Justice Abandoned”?

March 4, 2025
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In “Justice Abandoned”, Rachel Elise Barkow argues that much of the blame for the blight of American mass incarceration lies with the Supreme Court.

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