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Jazz Week 2013: After a tumultuous year, Boston looks ahead

April 26, 2013
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In the wake of the horrors of last week, Jazz Week 2013 comes as almost an act of defiance, an insistence that life will go on in all sectors of the Boston community.

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Book Review: “The Bottom of the Jar” — An Indelible Glimpse of Moroccan Life

April 25, 2013
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Moroccan poet Abdellatif Laâbi’s autobiographical fiction draws deeply on his own childhood in Fez during the late 1940s and especially the 1950s.

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Concert Review: Pianist Evgeny Kissin — An Extraordinary Recital

April 25, 2013
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In my experience, few leave an Evgeny Kissin concert disappointed.

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Visual Arts Feature: The Design Museum Boston Invites You to Sit Yourself Down

April 24, 2013
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In a modest tweak of Dorothy Fields’ lyrics to the famous Jerome Kern song, this weekend will be Boston’s chance, via the Design Museum Boston, to sit yourself down, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

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Music Commentary: The 15th Annual New England Metalfest — Blunt Over Pretty

April 23, 2013
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I was curious to see how the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent events would filter into the fest. It began with my Facebook newsfeed displaying “Going to Worcester to blow off steam”-type messages.

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Cultural Commentary: Why is Boston’s Arts Coverage So Bland?

April 22, 2013
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According to our docile mainstream media, Boston enjoys a perpetual Renaissance — the merchandise in the cultural window is always worth buying. And that predictability makes for very boring journalism.

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Book Review: “The Melancholy Art” — Art History and Depression

April 21, 2013
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If I suffered half as much from the thought that most art has been lost as I suffer every day from the recollection of departed family and friends, I would be in a mental hospital. In this sense, I found myself resisting the message of “The Melancholy Art,” to the point that I felt that the book was laying a guilt trip on me.

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Book Review: “The Dream Merchant” — Gambling with Power and Possibility

April 20, 2013
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Part of what made “The Dream Merchant” so compelling, and at times, harrowing, a read for me are its themes: love, loss, rags and riches, to be sure, but also the theme of aging, and associated loss of power and possibility.

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Book Review: “The Virtues of Poetry” — Fascinating But Frustrating

April 20, 2013
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James Longenbach’s ear for the nuances of diction, tone, stress, and the material aspects of poetry is so good, and his grasp of context and biography so assured, one wonders why the essays so often tie themselves into semantic and logical knots.

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Book Review: Females on the Frontier of Medicine — Healers in Early Modern Germany

April 19, 2013
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In her groundbreaking study, Tufts University professor Alisha Rankin essentially revises the history of medicine by showing that women, presumed to be marginal in the development early modern medicine, were actually major players.

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