Princeton University Press
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Read More
Betye Saar’s assemblages and travel sketchbooks are rich in references and symbols; they are mysterious and introspective, more spiritual than political.
Read More
Faced with the dual dilemmas of the opacity of the albums themselves and the now painfully obvious narrative of colonialism, wealth, and white privilege, some of Fellow Wanderer’s authors dodge into more easily researched side issues.
Read More
If historian Thomas Crow’s goal is to explain how these rebels of the counterculture reshaped American art, he is at least partly successful.
Read More
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and this new biography does a thorough and compelling job in telling the story of a remarkable and partially tragic life.
Read More
In the US, Thomas Mann tacitly proposed himself as an almost messianic figure, stately, dramatic, and wrathful at once, striding forth to represent German culture in exile and, increasingly, free Germany itself.
Read More
A thorough sociologist, Carolyn Chen shows, step-by-step, how companies self-consciously appropriate religious language and rituals, creating a ‘theology’ in which work and purpose are perfectly aligned in the lives of their highest-value employees.
Read More
Martin Puchner is stumped because what is called for is a genuinely radical rethink about what role literature and literary studies should play in avoiding the global meltdown to come.
Read More
Markus Friedrich, a professor of early modern history at the University of Hamburg, has written a scholarly but immensely readable history of the order that will appeal to an audience beyond the Catholic tradition.
Read More
Book Review: “Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life” — Less Intriguing But Even More Mysterious
As befits an official biography, Silver and Greenwald approach their subject with decorum and respect: they neither hide nor emphasize potentially controversial elements, carefully outlining the sources of money in Isabella’s family and the old Boston Brahmin fortune of her devoted husband.
Read More