Books

Visual Arts Interview: The Colonial Elephant in the Room — Talking with Barnaby Phillips, author of “Loot: Britain and The Benin Bronzes”

June 16, 2021
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Last week, just a month after the publication of Loot in the US, the Met in New York announced that it was returning two Benin Bronzes to Nigeria.

Book Review: “What You Can See From Here” – Hopefully Romantic

June 13, 2021
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There is enough candor and humor, along with a handful of bracingly moody characters, to make Mariana Leky’s vision of perpetual love compelling.

Book Review: “Broadway Goes to War — American Theater during World War II”

June 13, 2021
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For many dramatists, the label of ‘leftism’ was not pejorative: it was about fighting for human decency and political reform.

Book Review: “Seeing Sideways” — Parenting on the Edge

June 11, 2021
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Those who have followed Throwing Muses’ Kristin Hersh’s career over the past three decades are the target audience for this memoir. But she is a good enough writer to interest people who may never have listened to her music.

Book Review: “Refugee: A Memoir” — A Powerful Story of the Plight of Millions

June 11, 2021
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Refugee: A Memoir was not written to entertain but to outrage and activate.

Book Review: “Hard Like Water” — The Revolution Will Be Eroticized

June 10, 2021
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There is no gainsaying that Hard Like Water is, in English, an important book, if only because of its refreshingly sensual vision of the appeal of the Cultural Revolution.

June Short Fuses – Materia Critica

June 7, 2021
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

Book Review: “Warhol” — Pop Art’s Timeless Impresario

June 1, 2021
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Accessible to the art-loving novice, Blake Gopnik’s Warhol suggests that his subject’s marketing genius doesn’t have a time limit.

Book Review: “The Fascination of What’s Difficult: A Life of Maud Gonne” — Ireland’s Unlikable Joan of Arc

May 28, 2021
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“What happens when you discover your heroine was a vile anti-Semite?”

Book Review: “A Place Like Mississippi” — The Home of a Sophisticated Multiracial Literary Culture

May 24, 2021
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Literate people in the state will be familiar with this story, but it may come as a revelation to those whose Mississippi is limited to a cultural Bermuda Triangle on whose sharp angles sit William Faulkner, John Grisham, and Oprah Winfrey.

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