Translated from the Danish by Per Brask & Patrick Friesen Review by Walter Cummins In his Afterword, Niels Hav writes, “Poetry’s first duty is to be an intimate talk with…
Category: Genres
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
Review by Brian Tanguay In the Human Stain, the late Philip Roth’s award-winning novel published in 2000, an academic named Coleman Silk has his life, career and reputation derailed for…
The Last Gift by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Review by Walter Cummins Although The Last Gift (2011) is not 2021 Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most acclaimed novel—the Booker Prize short-listed Paradise is—it illustrates his many strengths as…
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
Review by Brian Tanguay Warfare is one of the oldest practices in human history, one that creates and destroys empires, topples or installs kings and dictators, and inflicts suffering on…
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder; Illustrated by Nora Krug
Review by David Starkey Crown published Timothy Snyder’s original, text-only version of On Tyranny in February of 2017, a little more than a month after Donald Trump took office. The…
Lush Life: Food & Drinks from the Garden by Valerie Rice
Review by George Yatchisin I’d argue that the best cookbooks double as secret memoirs, often telling us more about the author than a straight-ahead account that began, “I was born…
The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski
Review by George Yatchisin It took Joe Posnanski three attempts to accomplish the feat that is The Baseball 100. When he finally pulled off the basis of what became this…
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Review by Brian Tanguay When I began reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the 2018 book by historian Yuval Noah Harari, I was feeling at loose ends about the…
The History of Bones by John Lurie
Review by George Yatchisin John Lurie, musician, artist, reluctant actor, avatar of 1980s downtown New York City cool, makes this pronouncement fifty pages in to his fascinating memoir The History…
Frick Diptych Series
Holbein’s Sir Thomas More by Hilary Mantel and Xavier F. Salomon; Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid by Margaret Iacono and James Ivory; Gouthière’s Candelabras by Edmund de Waal and Charlotte Vignon;…