Books
Clea Simon’s latest mystery, “Bad Boy Beat,” features the memorable heroine Em Kelton, a tough Boston journalist who can mix with the hard-boiled reporters and hard-living cops on her beat — none of whom want to realize that she happens to be a brilliant detective.
Other readers may be more sympathetic to this informative book’s broader conclusions about the rise of LP’s and the “erasure of black bodies and black aesthetics.
Many of the circumstances and particular cases Debbie Hines discusses in “Get Off My Neck” are grim, even sickening. But her experience in the American justice system has taught Hines to choose hope and struggle over despair. And that is encouraging.
This disturbing and beautiful book concerns itself mostly with Israelis living in America, and Maya Arad has brought her characters and their stories to life in meaningful and unforgettable ways.
Translator Stephen Mitchell serves Catullus best with the poems that don’t demand cleverness, where the sentiment is at least seemingly direct.
Throughout “Out of Left Field,” Stan Isaacs revisits events he covered decades earlier, some of them as significant as the World Series, some of them as silly as frog jumping.
A trio of picture books about people establishing nurturing links.
The best part of the Silver/Ursini book is the padding, the last forty pages in which the two authors go past “Double Indemnity”‘s release to contextualize it within the generic stream of “film noir”.
Lyle C. May reminds us that large numbers of men sentenced to death have been exonerated, and that at every level the apparatus of the carceral state is erratic at best and dramatically biased against minorities and the poor.
Design and Visual Arts: Affordable Housing, By Design