Books
“The Endless Week” is a brave, uneven, at times brilliant swathe of prose. Experimental? For certain. Perhaps the only way to write an Internet novel is by looking from the inside out.
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Jennifer Ann Redmond’s sympathetic approach to Diana Barrymore’s disastrous life is valuable because it rejects the poor-little-rich-girl tropes. She was more than a debauched debutante or fallen starlet.
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All in all, this is a crisp, entertaining, and, so far as I can see, an accurate account of the last acts in Henri Matisse’s career.
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The book presents brisk, information-rich capsule biographies of twenty largely under-publicized figures who, against the odds and at significant personal sacrifice, worked valiantly to promote a range of underdog causes, from abolition to union organizing to disarmament.
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As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” Rather than ask how progress ends, shouldn’t we be asking how progress bends?
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A new documentary bares (almost) all about stripper-actress Tura Satana.
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Of special interest is Askold Melnyczuk’s treatment of objects. His imagination transforms curios into uncanny artefacts.
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Although Greg Epstein’s analysis and critique of what he calls a tech religion are on target, his solutions for undoing its damage are bland, vague, and toothless.
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An illuminating book about the 19th-century American artist Francesca Alexander, a Bostonian who shaped a very different life for herself and for her art.
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The political and moral consequences of the Compromise of 1850 continue to be debated, but Peter Charles Hoffer’s book offers valuable lessons on how concession and consensus once served as pillars of the Republic.
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Arts Remembrance: In Memoriam — Tom Stoppard