Distanz Review by Brian Tanguay Not long after receiving a copy of Looking at Mexico/Mexico Looks Back, Claudia Sheinbaum was overwhelmingly elected as Mexico’s first female president, a milestone in…
Category: Art & Music
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan
Penguin Review by Walter Cummins Despite the depiction of the many triumphs of three of the greatest jazz musicians—many might argue of musicians in any genre—3 Shades of Blue is…
Lou Reed: The King of New York by Will Hermes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by George Yatchisin Will Hermes admits he’s on a fool’s errand with the opening quote of the preface to his 529 page biography of Lou…
Bloom: On Becoming an Artist Later in Life by Janice Mason Steeves
Friesen Review by Linda Lappin Painter and art educator Janice Mason Steeves came to art quite by chance late in life after a friend invited her to attend a pottery…
The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser
Liveright Review by David Starkey Last month, I was lucky enough to be in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This was my first visit to that august institution, so I…
All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley
Simon & Schuster Review by David Starkey What in the world are they thinking, those uniformed museum guards standing in the corners of the galleries, looking alternately stern and bored,…
Don’t Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You by Lucinda Williams
Crown Review by Brian Tanguay One anecdote in Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You captures the essence of Lucinda Williams, the acclaimed American singer/songwriter. In 1993, Williams won…
The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century by Owen Hopkins
Frances Lincoln Review by David Starkey In The Museum: From its Origins to the 21st Century, Owen Hopkins, Director of the Farrell Centre at Newcastle University, focuses on three key…
No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk by Gavin Butt
Duke Review by George Yatchisin Polymath producer-musician Brian Eno has this great theory about “scenius” as the corrective to “‘genius,’ which exemplifies what I call the ‘Big Man’ theory of…
Vienna 1900, Edited by Hans-Peter Wipplinger
Review by David Starkey When I visited the Leopold Museum in Vienna this past spring, I must admit that I was wowed. I was familiar, of course, with the creepy…