Books

Book Review: “Building 46” — Much More than a Chinese Ghost Story

June 13, 2022
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Author and journalist Massoud Hayoun’s novel Building 46 probes behind the air-brushed image of China’s capital city to offer a fascinating (and incisive) look into the everyday lives of Beijing dwellers.

Book Review: “You Have a Friend in 10A” — A Laboratory of a Short Story Collection

June 6, 2022
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You come away from this volume of short stories thinking that sure, Maggie Shipstead does write what she knows — it’s just that she may know everything.

Book Review: Food for Thought, but Pie in the Sky: “Running with Robots — The American High School’s Third Century”

June 4, 2022
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Running with Robots not only makes reading about education reform fun, but also prods a broad readership to think critically about how learning should work in a future guided by artificial intelligence.

Short Fuse Podcast #54: From Madison Avenue to Rikers Island

June 1, 2022
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Host Elizabeth Howard talks to Mark Goldsmith about his book Madison Avenue to Rikers Island. He is the founder and CEO emeritus of Getting Out and Staying Out, a nonprofit that provides educational, vocational, job readiness, counseling, and other services to young men who have been incarcerated.

Book Review: Humanizing Our Youth — “Gen Z, Explained: The Art of Living in a Digital Age”

May 28, 2022
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Throughout, Gen Z, Explained does its best to help readers relate to its protagonists by placing them in Gen Z’s shoes.

Book Review: “Woman, Eating” — A Poignant Bite All Its Own

May 21, 2022
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Author Claire Kohda is particularly deft at illustrating how unacknowledged desire will out, undermining our best intentions.

Book Review: “Venus&Document” — Framing the World in Abstractions

May 21, 2022
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This novel of ideas reads like an essay narrated in the first-person by a self-absorbed automaton.

Graphic Novel Review: Pictorially Evocative Narratives About Visually Creative Personalities

May 20, 2022
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Graphic novels are wonderfully suited to chronicle the lives and times of artists, designers, architects, and even creative institutions.

Book Review: The Many Faces of the Muse

May 19, 2022
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Muse upends convention by examining twenty-nine real life situations that offer a broader, and more generous, view of what a muse can be.

Book Review: “Free” — A Communist Childhood

May 18, 2022
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With gentle humor and insight, Lea Ypi draws rich portraits of the three caring adults she grew up with in the authoritarian world of her childhood in Albania.

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