Yale-University-Press

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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Book Review: “The Notes” of Ludwig Hohl — “Everything Ever Created Was a Fragment.”

October 28, 2021
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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.

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Book Review: Man Ray — He Could Have Been a Contender

October 7, 2021
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The biography raises the subject of Man Ray’s Jewish roots, but the matter is dropped pretty quickly.

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