Yale-University-Press

Book Review: “John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits” — Mugs Galore!

August 11, 2025
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Quibbles aside, this book’s profusion of illustrations is a windfall for artists, art students, and those keen on close looking and visual culture.

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Book Review: “Sargent and Paris” — Sargent and Amnesia

April 29, 2025
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I wish this catalogue spelled out John Singer Sargent’s professional stance as a “juste milieu” painter more methodically. That term refers to those eager to be associated with new stylistic tendencies yet careful not to transgress the establishment’s norms.

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November Short Fuses — Materia Critica

November 1, 2023
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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 Reviews: Chronicles of Russia’s War on Ukraine — Hope Is the Thing with Teeth

May 15, 2023
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Two powerufl volumes show that Ukraine’s greatest weapons against Russia are hope and unity.

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Book Review: “Look at the Lights, My Love” — Meditations in a Superstore

April 4, 2023
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Can Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux lend literary dignity to a big-box store?

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Book Review: “Why Dance Matters” — Slip Sliding Away

February 28, 2023
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Because Mindy Aloff is so deeply personal and idiosyncratic — and so dependent on what was programmed by certain theaters, in certain years — her book distorts the very topic it is intended to illuminate.

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Book Review: “Folk Music — A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs”

November 3, 2022
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At points Greil Marcus’ digressive style can seem like nervy brilliance, at others, idle whimsy. What ennobles the book is the critic’s love for his underlying subject: the soulful search for a truer America.

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Book Review: “Autobiographies of an Angel” — A Short Wild Ride

September 12, 2022
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What we have here is the voice of one trying to navigate, endure, rise above, and somehow pacify a tapestry of cruelty and grief, while it struggles to find the words and voice that will do the work.

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Book Review: On Our Love Affair With Catastrophe — So Long as it is Happening to Someone Else

April 1, 2022
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David Thomson’s meditation on our love of disasters is engagingly allusive, reflective, humane, wide-ranging, and often funny.

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December Short Fuses – Materia Critica

December 5, 2021
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Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.

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