Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Yale-University-Press
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.
Book Reviews: A Provocative Trio of Volumes on Architecture and Landscape Architecture
In very different ways and on very different topics, three recent books assuage notions that architecture/design books are formidable reads.
Book Review: “Physics & Dance” — The Intelligence of Movement
The authors let dance serve as a way of embodied knowing — an intelligence that can unlock an understanding of physics’ theories and abstractions.
Book Review: “Love in the New Millennium” — Inscrutable Passion
This is a bewildering, frustrating, deeply weird novel, densely written and remarkably free of signposts.