Books

Book Review: “I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms” — Nancy Shear’s Harmonious Life in Music

October 21, 2025
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How our memoirist and the man who shook Mickey Mouse’s hand crossed paths is characteristic of the author’s good fortune and perseverance.

Book Review: “House of Diggs” — The Tragic Arc of a Black Civil Rights Champion

October 18, 2025
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“House of Diggs” is an engaging biography of a historically important Black Congressman, an effective advocate for racial equality who fell prey to the temptation of ‘living large.’

Book Review: “Against Morality” — The Shaming Regime

October 17, 2025
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“Against Morality” is the cri de coeur of a cultural critic who realizes that the presentation of art and its adjacent pursuits, including much art itself, have become the subsidiaries of progressive politics.

Book Review: “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It” — Brushing Away Platform Decay

October 16, 2025
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Journalist Cory Doctorow transforms what might be seen as a viral complaint into a theory of digital decay, tracing how the internet’s early architecture of openness curdled into a landscape of monopolized chokepoints.

Book Review: Internet’s Workers, Tech’s Winners — A Flawed Take in “Amateurs!”

October 15, 2025
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There’s a great book to be written about how everyday users create the content that powers the web, while billionaires reap the profits. But this one isn’t it.

Book Review: “Lion Hearts” — Dan Jones Brings His Essex Dogs Saga to a Stirring Close

October 14, 2025
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Novelist Dan Jones excels in re-imagining the life of common people in wartime, in particular a small group of English fighters embroiled in the so-called Hundred Years War (1337–1453) between England and France.

Poetry Review: “On the Slaughter” — Brilliant, Personal Translations of the National Poet of Israel

October 14, 2025
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If there ever was anyone to handle Hayim Nahman Bialik’s broad, impressive, and impressionistic craft with the acute passion, it is scholar and poet Peter Cole.

Poetry Review: Shangyang Fang’s “Study of Sorrow: Translations”

October 8, 2025
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We owe Shangyang Fang a debt for bringing the delicacy, obliqueness, and sheer tremulous beauty of these Chinese poems to English-speaking readers.

Book Review: “Queer Enlightenments” – Flaming Creatures of Yore

October 8, 2025
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This lively foray into popular history, and others, exemplifies the move to attract younger audiences with open and freewheeling interests in gender and sexual nonconformity.

Book Review: “Fifty Poems” — An Offering on the Altar of Rainer Maria Rilke

October 7, 2025
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If, as a commemorative volume, “Fifty Poems” introduces readers to sample the German poet more extensively, either in the original or in the range of translations currently available, it will have accomplished a valuable task.

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