Books
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is a moral to this story, besides the obvious one, that murder is a horrible crime whether the body is found or not. If there are wealthy women with weaknesses to exploit, predators will find them.
We have a biography that reads like a novel in its range and intensity, a biography that forces us to dig deeper into our own preconceived prejudices and understand another man — a famous writer — in ways that neither he nor we might have ever thought possible.
Mick Herron’s prose, it must be said, remains top-notch, chock full of puns and timely references, as well as colorful dialogue. But the premise of this successful series of espionage thrillers is beginning to show some wear.
Book Commentary: Three Weeks Before the Mast — Reading “Moby Dick”
A slow thinker, I read 600 pages into “Moby Dick” before putting my finger on the book’s key tension. It’s between Ishmael’s intense and ecological whale love and the central story which chronicles the wanton murdering of whales, man’s unconcern with destroying the natural world.
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