Books
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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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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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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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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Arts Commentary: From the Editor’s Desk — By Popular Demand, 2026