The subtitle of Lucasta Miller’s Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph tells you most of what you need to know about the book’s contents. It is…
Category: Genres
The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism by Traci Brynne Voyles
Review by Brian Tanguay I have never seen the Salton Sea with my own eyes. My experience of the Colorado Desert is limited to one or two road trips to…
Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain by Charles Leerhsen
Review by Elizabeth Starkey The introduction to Charles Leerhsen’s Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain concludes with a recap of one of those piquant Tony voice-overs,…
Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun
Review by David Starkey As he appears in Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, Ada Calhoun’s father, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, seems like kind…
Foundlings by DeWitt Henry
Review by Jack Smith Essayist, memoirist, fiction writer, prize-winning novelist, and founder and editor of Ploughshares, DeWitt Henry has gained a solid reputation for his contributions to several literary forms,…
Shanda: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy by Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Review by Walter Cummins In her latest book, Shanda, Letty Cottin Pogrebin revisits the early and mid-twentieth century obsession with covering up family scandals that, if revealed, would destroy the…
Home: A Story of Emigration by Anthony Stevens
Review by Linda Lappin In this lyrical, hybrid narrative combining novel, documentary, autobiography, and diary, British author, Anthony Stevens pieces together a chapter of his family history: his great grandparents’…
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…
Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire by Jonathan M. Katz
Review by George Yatchisin Forget about the butterfly effect, it seems the last 130 years of U.S. foreign involvement should be called the Butler Effect. By that I refer to…
Hidden Cargoes by Chris Arthur
Review by Walter Cummins Hidden Cargoes—like Chris Arthur’s previous eight essay collections—is a book that can change your life, not so much your behaviors and beliefs but how you relate…