Books
At its best, Steve Reich’s Conversations is illuminating and engaging, an honest discussion of the creative process by one of the major composers of our times.
A lot of history is jammed into this book, but the author manages to ruminate in an informative and engrossing way on 50-plus years of pop music.
Historian Katherine Harvey’s well-researched and lively book shows that in the Middle Ages lust had its way. Big time.
What we have here is the voice of one trying to navigate, endure, rise above, and somehow pacify a tapestry of cruelty and grief, while it struggles to find the words and voice that will do the work.
In this genial, colorful memoir, Leslie McFarlane reveals the long path to how, anonymously, he became author of the most best-selling series of boys’ books in publishing history, twenty million volumes and counting.
Writer Vincent Czyz (and Arts Fuse critic) talks about his wide-ranging essay collection The Secret Adventures of Order.
Steve Stern’s novel about the Jewish expressionist painter Chaim Soutine is more informative than it is engaging.
Kirsty Bell’s psychological-cultural-topographical-historical walking tour of Berlin is an idiosyncratic delight.
Faleeha Hassan’s assessment of the damage America caused — through the ‘good intentions’ of regime change — may surprise many who depended on the mainstream media to learn about what happened in Iraq.
Neither book is primarily directly about the war itself. Rather, in sometimes oblique ways, they show the price paid by Ukraine’s non-combatant civilians.
Arts Commentary: The Last Laugh — Stephen Colbert, Comedy, and Cultural Resistance