The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton

Pantheon Review by Walter Cummins Emmanuel Kant relished fine wines and gourmet meals. Werner Heisenberg thought profoundly as he strolled through a park in winter. Jorge Luis Borges was devastated…

August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan

Simon & Schuster Review by Brian Tanguay August Wilson’s cycle of ten plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century, which include the critically acclaimed Joe Turner’s Come…

Misfit: Growing Up Awkward in the ’80s by Gary Gulman

Flatiron Review by George Yatchisin Gary Gulman is the kind of comedian you figured had a book in him, given his love of words and language that helped him craft…

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Knopf Review by David Starkey The cover of Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is well-chosen. It shows the short, solid and tanned torso of Pablo Picasso beneath the three-dimensional…

The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Zadie Smith published a piece in The New Yorker about her efforts to ignore “the long shadow” of Charles Dickens (“On Killing Charles Dickens”) when…

Passing for White

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom by Ilyon Woo (Simon and Schuster), The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (Berkeley), “Passing” from…

The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America’s Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke

Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay In the Preface to The Pornography Wars, Kelsy Burke explains her methodology as a sociologist, writing that she doesn’t assume that others who hold beliefs…

Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond

(Crown) Review by Brian Tanguay What Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) is to racial inequality in the criminal justice system in America,…