Long ago, my children and I celebrated at the library whenever we came across a favorite picture book by Arnold Lobel. No matter how many times we read it, The […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Contrasts and Convergence of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Penial Joseph’s The Sword and the Shield examines the titans of black power and civil rights
In 1972, James Baldwin wrote “The Shot That Echoes Still,” a painful and personal essay for Esquire magazine reflecting on the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller Finds Truth in Taxonomy
Reflecting on the obsessions of a Stanford scientist, she heals herself
Lulu Miller calls David Starr Jordan, the protagonist of her book Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, “David.” Born in the […]
BOOK REVIEW
Racism and The Broken Heart of America
Walter Johnson’s history of St. Louis documents the causes of a continuing crisis
In the months after the murder of black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, historian Walter Johnson began work on The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and […]
POETRY
Scissors (for Max)
Slip a pair of scissors in your pocket, my son. Lace your thumb and pointer through the hand holds. Steady! Leave the realm of your home, out the front door, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Unearthing the Corporate Misdeeds Behind ‘Death in Mud Lick’
Eric Eyre’s intrepid reporting on the opioid epidemic has a timely message
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Eyre braids together two riveting stories in Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic. Numbers are […]
BOOK REVIEW
Four Reporters Who Shook the World
Nancy Cott’s Fighting Words recalls those who wrote history in the making
It is generally accepted that what news reporters write is consigned to obscurity. Journalism from long ago may be useful for documenting a certain time or place, but, otherwise, the […]
CAREGIVING
Past Practices of Cookery and Hygiene
Finding comfort in ‘simple remedies’ and suffrage sarcasm
I turned to old cookbooks for comfort last week, wondering what my American foremothers had done in times of crisis and scarcity. Given that our best strategy at slowing the […]
BOOK REVIEW
Unequal Protection Under the Law
Adam Cohen’s Supreme Inequality finds the Court guilty of ruling unfairly
Forty-seven years ago this month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell concluded that the state of Texas did not have to remedy inequalities in school funding across deeply segregated school […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Hell-bent Women of Suffrage
Ellen DuBois explores a relentless fight’s strategies and divisions
There are but 29 words to the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was formally adopted on Aug. 26, 1920: “The right of the citizens of the United States […]
BOOK REVIEW
Family Papers and the History of Sephardic Jews
The story of one family spans the globe and a catastrophic century
Two tragedies have shaped the fortunes of the family of Sa’adi Besalel Ashkenazi a-Levi, an iconoclast and printer: the catastrophic fire in Salonica in 1917 and the Nazi Holocaust. Readers […]
BOOK REVIEW
Larry Kramer’s Queer Epic of Love and Death
Taking in The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact
There is much sex but little love in the first volume of writer and activist Larry Kramer’s The American People, subtitled Search for My Heart. It contains episodes of imagined […]
BOOK REVIEW
‘The Hidden World of the Fox’ Is a Guide to Coexistence
Author Adele Brand prefers facts to unfounded fears
I enjoyed watching an adorable mother fox and kits last summer in my South Wellfleet neighborhood. I considered myself privileged to witness their antics and also to catch glimpses of […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Out Loud: A Memoir, Mark Morris Bares All
But the modern dance master is less than self-aware
“Whatever is in him,” the critic Joan Acocella wrote of Mark Morris in her 1993 biography, “out it comes. This goes for his dances — he creates with extraordinary ease […]
