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When discussing Friedrich Engels’s lament for lobster salad, Tristram Hunt dubs him “the original champagne communist,” but his biography is far from a damning portrayal. Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt. Henry Holt & Company, Metropolitan Books, 448 pages, $32. Reviewed by Harvey Blume Among the most memorable words Karl…
By Helen Epstein Oct-8-13 Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich Symphony Hall Boston, MA Vasily Petrenko, conductor Audiences as well as composers project their emotions and fantasies onto every piece of art with which they engage, but I think this is particularly true of instrumental music, whose non-verbal, non-visual yet powerfully emotional expressiveness is as open to…
By Caldwell Titcomb Three works by major composers made up the free concert presented by the Boston Conservatory Wind Ensemble on October 10 at the Midway Studios in South Boston. On the podium was Eric Hewitt, who holds a bachelor’s in saxophone performance and a master’s in conducting – both from the New England Conservatory…
By Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her…
The governing idea of “A New Literary History of America” is that it is about a made-up nation and a made-up literature. That means every time an author, a thinker, an actor in our national story sets out to do something that person discovers America for the first time. Each actor in the drama of…
By Peter Walsh A Tomb Gets its Time Forget Indiana Jones. Archaeology is not about the obvious. Case in point: the Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition, The Secrets of Tomb 10A, opening October 18.
Author Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that each of the sometimes tangentially related processes in a video game shapes “the audience’s experience as fundamentally as the specifics of the images used in a motion picture.” Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies by Noah Wardrip-Fruin. The MIT Press, 480 pp, $34.95. Reviewed by Mark Nolan…
The Massachusetts State Sandwich? Fluffernutter as Icon? By Sally Steinberg No serious eater, no gourmet, no culture vulture, no thinking person, no person of discriminating taste, no one interested in nutrition could…… But wait! The Fluffernutter might just be one of the secret food grails, its own Umami, all by itself, an elusive, indescribable, uncategorizable,…
By Bill Marx October includes the usual line-up of plays by seal-of-approval dramatists, Edward Albee and Conor McPherson, but there’s some welcome new blood, from Punchdrunk’s athletic adaptation of “Macbeth” to “Little Black Dress,” playwright Ronan Noone’s latest salvo at our national psyche, and “The Overwhelming,” the Boston premiere of a critically acclaimed study of…
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