PublicAffairs Review by Walter Cummins It’s a common assumption that the technological inventions and innovations of recent centuries have increased wealth and living standards throughout the world. As a reality…
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The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work by Sam Quinones
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay It’s not often I start a review with, “I loved this book,” but in the case of The Perfect Tuba by Sam Quinones it’s the…
Saving Ourselves From Big Car by David Obst
Columbia Business School Publishing Review by Brian Tanguay When I lived in Tokyo many years ago, my street was just wide enough for two vehicles to pass within inches of…
Without Precedent: How Chief Justice John Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights by Lisa Graves
Bold Type Books Review by Brian Tanguay Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about the Supreme Court or how its rulings impact their lives, until the court strips away…
Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza
Norton Review by David Starkey Living in the Present with John Prine, the new book by Tom Piazza, seems like it shouldn’t work. Piazza’s encounters with Prine were too scattered…
Talking All Night: The New York Poets – Interviews, Photographs, Letters by Mark Hillringhouse
Serving House Review by David Starkey In an interview with Mark Hillringhouse, poet Anne Waldman responds to a question about the literary scene with a quote that could apply to…
To Phrase a Prayer for Peace by Donna Spruijt-Metz
Wildhouse Review by Catherine Abbey Hodges To Phrase a Prayer for Peace, Donna Spruijt-Metz’s second full-length collection of poems, chronicles the poet’s experience of the first 118 days of the…
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival by Stephen Greenblatt
Norton Review by David Starkey It’s appropriate that the painting on the cover of Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival may, or…
Playworld by Adam Ross
Knopf Review by Walter Cummins In Adam Ross’s Playworld, Griffin Hurt, the narrator, depicts a collection of situations he lived through during his years from middle school until early high…
The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains by Pria Anand
Washington Square Review by Walter Cummins Pria Anand starts The Mind Electric by relating two childhood fascinations—her grandfather’s neurological symptoms from post-polio syndrome and, before she could read, the fantastical…