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.
Yale-University-Press
Book Review: “Autobiographies of an Angel” — A Short Wild Ride
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.
Book Review: On Our Love Affair With Catastrophe — So Long as it is Happening to Someone Else
David Thomson’s meditation on our love of disasters is engagingly allusive, reflective, humane, wide-ranging, and often funny.
December Short Fuses – Materia Critica
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Book Review: “The Notes” of Ludwig Hohl — “Everything Ever Created Was a Fragment.”
Ludwig Hohl belongs in the line of such lucidly contentious thinkers as Karl Kraus, Pascal, and Lichtenberg, commentators whose writing oscillates between the traditions of literature and philosophy.
Book Review: Man Ray — He Could Have Been a Contender
The biography raises the subject of Man Ray’s Jewish roots, but the matter is dropped pretty quickly.
Book Review: The Woman Behind “All-of-a-Kind Family” — A Remarkable Legacy
Biographer June Cummins considers the first All-of-a-Kind Family book, published in 1951, as groundbreaking and Sydney Taylor as “one of the first writers of multicultural literature for children.”
Book Review: “Art and Faith” — Creating Revelatory Beauty
Art and Faith should be widely read — its delightful wisdom and clarity underlines our culture’s desperate need to make things new.
Book Review: “Irving Berlin: New York Genius” — A Significant Life
Biographer James Kaplan was aided by the assistance of Irving Berlin’s two elder daughters, and that makes this biography particularly valuable.
Book Review: A Concise, Conscientious Guide to the Life and Work of Alfred Stieglitz
The book will stand as a good first stop for anyone interested in Alfred Stieglitz, 20th-century photography, or American modern art.