Review

Book Review: “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” — Into a New Clearing

February 18, 2025
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Besides giving us a multi-faceted portrait of Robert Frost that leaves the poet tantalizingly inscrutable, Adam Plunkett does what the best biographers of great writers do: send us back to the work with renewed curiosity and heightened appreciation.

Book Review: “Río Muerto” — The Abiding Strength of Humanity

February 17, 2025
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Among this novel’s merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances.

Book Review: “Just Beyond the Light” — Essential Heavy-Metal Lit

February 17, 2025
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There are similarities between Randall Blythe’s music and his prose; both acknowledge the inescapable turmoil, darkness, and tragedy that bedevils everyone.

Book Review: Surviving Stalin in “No Country For Love”

February 16, 2025
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In this compulsively readable novel, a Ukrainian Jewish woman does what she needs to survive in the nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic Stalin-era Soviet Union.

Visual Arts Review: “The Art of Looking” — The Evolution of Harvard’s Art History Department

February 15, 2025
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The show may be a case of inside baseball, appealing to a small group of art history majors and museum lovers. But it offers a fascinating look at innovation at one of the country’s most revered, and most traditional, colleges.

Film Review: “Captain America: Brave New World” – ‘Tis New to Thee?

February 14, 2025
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“Captain America: Brave New World,” which is loaded with potential for drama and commentary, has less weight and punch than a butterfly’s fart.

Film Review: “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” — Cheesy But Satisfying

February 14, 2025
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Yes, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” is a cheesy, predictable rom-com. But it doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not.

Book Review: “Fine” — Lad Lit That’s Keenly Aware of the Human Condition and Its Afflictions

February 14, 2025
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John Patrick Higgins is a deft writer whose prose often displays a spare lyricism. 

Film Festival Reviews: Sundance Fest 3 — Ukrainian War, Alabama Prisons and Assisted Suicide

February 13, 2025
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Films can transform the way that their subjects are seen, sometimes by just making a subject visible. That was the case with three films which were among the best that I saw at Sundance this year.

Television Review: “Cassandra” — Machine Mom

February 13, 2025
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Cassandra is yet another critique of AI, but it’s also a provocative commentary on motherhood.

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