Books

Book Review: Soprano, Queen, Myth — Maria Callas in Jerome Charyn’s “Maria La Divina”

September 16, 2025
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At the very least, Jerome Charyn’s considerable novelistic imagination should send readers back to any number of documentary films and, most important, to the still very real fact of Maria Callas’s vital recorded legacy.

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Book Review: From Protest to Progress — Abdul-Jabbar’s Memoir Battles Historical Amnesia

September 15, 2025
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Given Donald Trump’s claim that American history has been “rewritten” and transformed into a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” “We All Want To Change the World” may be banned in some school libraries in America.

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Book Review: Risk, Rebellion, and Regret — Larry Charles Tells All in “Comedy Samurai”

September 14, 2025
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Larry Charles is by every standard a seminal figure in contemporary humor, on the tube and in movie theaters. Why doesn’t everyone know his name

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Book Review: A Killing with Everything But a Body – “Murder in the Dollhouse”

September 13, 2025
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There is a moral to this story, besides the obvious one, that murder is a horrible crime whether the body is found or not. If there are wealthy women with weaknesses to exploit, predators will find them.

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Book Review: “James Baldwin: A Love Story” — An Intimate Biography

September 11, 2025
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We have a biography that reads like a novel in its range and intensity, a biography that forces us to dig deeper into our own preconceived prejudices and understand another man — a famous writer — in ways that neither he nor we might have ever thought possible.

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Book Review: “Clown Town” — Not Quite as Amusing as Expected

September 9, 2025
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Mick Herron’s prose, it must be said, remains top-notch, chock full of puns and timely references, as well as colorful dialogue. But the premise of this successful series of espionage thrillers is beginning to show some wear.

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Book Commentary: Three Weeks Before the Mast — Reading “Moby Dick”

September 7, 2025
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A slow thinker, I read 600 pages into “Moby Dick” before putting my finger on the book’s key tension. It’s between Ishmael’s intense and ecological whale love and the central story which chronicles the wanton murdering of whales, man’s unconcern with destroying the natural world.

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Book Review: “Book of I” — A Gem of a Novel

September 7, 2025
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This novel is as fresh and charming as any contemporary work this critic has read in ages.

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Book Review: “Queer Lens” – Let the Record Show

September 5, 2025
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By Trevor Fairbrother The Queer Lens project made me think about queer culture and camera culture as distinct phenomena that began in the Victorian era: each was a manifestation of modernity. The latest exhibition that Paul Martineau has curated at the J. Paul Getty Museum is titled Queer Lens: A History of Photography and features…

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Children’s Book Reviews: Fall Is Here

September 3, 2025
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Two books that deal with different rituals of autumn.

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