Books

Book Review: “Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras” — Celebrating Blaxploitation Cinema

January 26, 2024
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“Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras” celebrates Blaxploitation as a positive as well as a necessary turning point in American cinema.

Book Review / Jazz Essay: A Complicated Matter — Stephen Provizer’s “As Long as They Can Blow”

January 24, 2024
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This is a story about jazz that we only think we know: the book challenges our preconceptions with admirable restraint, and generously invites others to build on its work.

Book Review: “Master Lovers” — An Inventive and Intelligent Fictional Memoir

January 18, 2024
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“Master Lovers” is written in a lucid, personable style, and the fictional scenes —  David Winner’s recreations of history and imagined trysts — are deft, believable, and vividly imagined.

Book Review: Jack Kerouac’s “Pic” — Last But Not Least

January 17, 2024
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In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac voiced a longing to be “other.” He achieves this transfiguration in “Pic.”

Book Review: “Hedged” — How Private Equity Destroyed the Newspaper Business

January 16, 2024
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Newspapers are still our most reliable source of local journalism. Private equity, though, is squeezing the life out of newsrooms as greedy owners cash in.

Book Review: “The Geography of the Imagination” — Longing for Something Lost

January 14, 2024
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Touted as “perhaps the last great American polymath,” Guy Davenport had a singular mind; never was an artist more deserving of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant.”

Book Review: “The Soundies” — A Definitive Study of the Musical Film Shorts of the ’40s

January 13, 2024
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Author Mark Cantor has been the go-to guy for jazz film for decades: this authoritative book solidifies his position.

Children’s Book Reviews: A Grief Out of Season

January 10, 2024
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The holidays and their aftermath are not always a time of cheer for families. Two recent children’s books provide empathy and understanding.

Book Reviews: The Novels of Argentine Author Claudia Piñeiro — More Than Mysteries

January 8, 2024
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A death is routinely at the center of Claudia Piñeiro’s fiction, but the corpse sparks provocative questions about the way things are, not just an investigation into finding the murderer.

Book Review: “Yves Montand: The Passionate Voice” — An Activist Entertainer

January 7, 2024
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Singer/actor Yves Montand’s life and career is particularly fascinating because they illuminate a telling difference between the mid-20th century political-cultural milieus of France and America.

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