Princeton University Press

January Short Fuses — Materia Critica

January 2, 2024
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

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Book Review: “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” — Sort of a Shaman

June 22, 2023
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Betye Saar’s assemblages and travel sketchbooks are rich in references and symbols; they are mysterious and introspective, more spiritual than political.

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Visual Arts/Book Review: “Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums” — Upper Class Gilded Age Tourism

April 14, 2023
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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.

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Book Review: “The Artist in the Counterculture” — California Dreamin’

February 17, 2023
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If historian Thomas Crow’s goal is to explain how these rebels of the counterculture reshaped American art, he is at least partly successful.

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Book Review: “Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life” — Less Intriguing But Even More Mysterious

December 19, 2022
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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.

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Book Review: “Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird” — A Writer’s Life

June 29, 2022
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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.

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Book Review: Thomas Mann in America

May 5, 2022
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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.

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Book Review: “Work Pray Code” — Managing and Deploying Spirituality in Silicon Valley

April 11, 2022
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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.

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Book Review: “Literature for a Changing Planet” — A Crash Course

March 11, 2022
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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.

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Book Review: “The Jesuits: A History” — The Order Continues

March 3, 2022
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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.

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