Henry Holt Review by David Starkey Darrin Bell’s The Talk joins James Spooner’s The High Desert as the second superb memoir published within a twelve month’s span about growing up…
Category: Genres
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…
Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, edited by Rebecca Solnit & Thelma Young Lutunatabua
Haymarket Review by George Yatchisin It’s not lost on me that I’m reading Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility as I take a fuel-guzzling flight…
Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder, trans. by Paulette Møller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Review by Walter Cummins Although Sophie’s World was first published in Norwegian more than thirty years ago and since then has been translated into close to…
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…
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent
Scribner Essay by Brian Tanguay When the conservative supermajority of the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, it overturned a…
Chasing Me To My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert as told to Erin I. Kelly
Bloomsbury Review by Brian Tanguay A black boy, just young enough to walk through town alone, hears a truck rumbling down the dirt road near a cafe. The truck pulls…
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan
Viking Review by David Starkey “It was the damnedest thing I ever saw,” says the aide to the great man, “how this guy could spread the bunk and make the…