Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Harvard University Press
Book Review: Through a Text, Too Darkly — The Life and Oration of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
Overall, the ITRL is an improvement over earlier efforts, but it falls short of expectations, particularly when it comes to providing a way into the world of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola for those beginning the journey.
Author Interview: David Livingstone Smith on Dehumanization and “Making Monsters”
Making Monsters “is a wake-up call. We need to seriously address the phenomenon of dehumanization if we are to have any hope of constraining it when things get really difficult.”
May Short Fuses – Materia Critica
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Book Review: “Burning the Books” — The Never-ending War on the Preservation of Knowledge
Burning the Books sometimes turns into a disturbing chronicle of mankind’s elemental hostility to learning: barbarians often first targeted libraries and archives.
Book Review: “Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin” — Naked City
Peter L’Official has written an important book that speaks with powerful relevance to the state of Black life in America today — and the demands of Black Lives Matter.
Book Review: “Accounting for Slavery” — Plantation Roots of Scientific Management
In this valuable study, Caitlin Rosenthal isolates an assortment of business practices and technologies that reflect the sophistication of New World plantation economies — dispelling myths of their romantic crudeness.
Commentary/Interview: “Du Bois’s Telegram” — Restricting Literary Resistance
Is there a disconnect between artists and meaningful resistance movements?
Book Review: “After Ireland” — An Insightful Survey
The critic settles too comfortably too often on a familiar trope — Ireland’s sense of promise squelched.
Book Review: Oscar Wilde Fights the Dying of the Light
Oscar Wilde’s life might have been tortured, but the writer never believed he had been disgraced, only rejected.