Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Harvard University Press
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.
Book Review: Richard A. Posner — A Rare Judge Who Tells Us How He Really Feels
Why didn’t a legal mind as brilliant as Richard Posner’s get to the Supreme Court? One suspects his candor and bluntness.
Book Review: Polish Poet Czesław Miłosz — Master of the Telling Detail
For a reader without the reference points of mid-twentieth century Lithuania and Poland, this deeply researched biography can be a slog.
Book Review: “The Menorah” and “The Book of Aron”
Two books — one nonfiction, the other fiction — that deal with Jewish history.