A thousand years ago, Sei Shōnagon set down on paper her wry observations of court life in Kyoto, the capital of Heian Japan. What was awkward to Sei? “The back […]
FLAG-WAVING
Stars, Stripes, and Sneetches
The ‘People’s Convoy’ calls to mind a Dr. Seuss classic
Barreling northeast on I-35 from Austin to Dallas in early March, my sister, husband, and I tried to ignore the flag-festooned caravan in the right lane. But we couldn’t avert […]
BOOK REVIEW
Meditations on the Tangled Cords of Jewish History
Dara Horn reckons with an anti-Semitic past and present
Organizations including the Pew Research Center, Anti-Defamation League, and American Jewish Committee all report an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the last several years. These incidents have ranged from Holocaust […]
BOOK REVIEW
Women Who Rocked the Boat
Siân Evans tells stories from above and below deck
In Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them, Siân Evans provides a lively account of the experiences of female workers and travelers aboard […]
BOOK REVIEW
Meg Lowman’s View From the Treetops
Her newest memoir reflects on adventures in advocacy and science
By now, American field biologist Meg Lowman deserves to be a household name. In the 1980s, Lowman — sometimes known as “Canopy Meg” — pioneered the use of spelunking equipment […]
BOOK REVIEW
Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros Look to the Future
In confronting the climate crisis, they write, ‘all our actions matter’
For nearly an entire week earlier this month, the global climate crisis managed to grab hold of headlines. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had released its […]
BOOK REVIEW
William di Canzio’s Alec Meets E.M. Forster’s Maurice
New novel reimagines a queer classic
The Englishman E.M. Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels and published five of these between 1905 and 1924. Best known and loved are A Room With a View, Howards End, and […]
BOOK REVIEW
Re-evaluating the Guilt of Ethel Rosenberg
Anne Sebba’s biography of an infamous woman
The American press largely supported Judge Irving Kaufman’s decision at the height of the Red Scare to sentence Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death. In March 1951, a jury found […]
BOOK REVIEW
A Descending Spiral of Violence and Injustice
Marc Bookman writes of the barbarism of the death penalty
It’s uncomfortable to feel entertained at the expense of those sentenced to death. It is less uncomfortable when most of this entertainment is at the expense of police, prosecuting attorneys, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Sarah Schulman’s Mesmerizing, Messy History of ACT UP
How an alphabet soup of affinity groups fought an epidemic
How do you tell the story of a movement without simply chronicling the lives of a few supposed leaders of that movement? Sarah Schulman tackles this question head-on in Let […]
BOOK REVIEW
Marga Vicedo Dismantles the Myth of the ‘Refrigerator Mother’
Her biography of Clara Park is also a history of autism
Teaching English to G.I.s returning to peacetime America after World War II, Clara Park wrote her mother of her frustration with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Her students, she noted, “had […]
BOOK REVIEW
Reassuring the First-Time Gardener
Jessica Sowards’s book is the cure for ‘analysis paralysis’
Sometime in the last year, as one does in a pandemic, I began cleaning drawers. Among the items that I found were unopened packets of seeds. Columbines I’d bought when […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Tranquility in Water, Wood, and Wild Things
Hannah Kirshner combines drawings, recipes, and personal memoir
Until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese government made it difficult for outsiders to explore the country. Even with rapid industrialization and modernization, Japan remained a hard place for […]
BOOK REVIEW
Finding Order in the Chaos of Fractals
Oliver Linton’s book is not for the number-phobic
I don’t know what I was expecting when I requested a reviewer’s copy of Oliver Linton’s Fractals: On the Edge of Chaos. The pocket-sized book, published in February, appeared to […]
BOOK REVIEW
Once Behind Bars, Forever Barred Entry
Reuben Jonathan Miller reckons with America’s ‘carceral system’
Michelle Alexander changed conversations about race-based discrimination in 2010 when she published The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Alexander explained that four in five Black […]
