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 […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Mothers Behind the Civil Rights Movement
Anna Malaika Tubbs gives their story a Black feminist affirmation
It is easy to pan Anna Malaika Tubbs’s The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation, released last month […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Survivors Is Jane Harper at Her Criminal Best
An Aussie mystery with echoes of the Outer Cape
If you are in need of a particularly good escape that requires no travel this pandemic February, look no further than Australian crime writer Jane Harper’s latest whodunit, The Survivors, […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Story of America Through Hand-Crafted Objects
Glenn Adamson’s new history looks at under-represented talents
Perhaps you are turned off by standard American histories, from expensive textbooks to doorstop-sized biographies of Important Men. You might find descriptions of the conflict between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander […]
BOOK REVIEW
Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar Tell It Like It Is
They write of casual racism with candor and humor
Under no circumstances should you crack the covers of Amber Ruffin’s and Lacey Lamar’s You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey in a place you need to be quiet — […]
OP-ED
The Bookworm’s Manifesto
Repairing the world by reading and writing about books
Should I be so lucky as to reach old age, I imagine I will be asked what I did during the pandemic year, when a virus set fire to the […]
BOOK REVIEW
Alexis Pauline Gumbs Reveals Marine Mammals’ Radical Nature
Reclaiming the ocean from the heteropatriarchy
Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes herself as a “queer Black feminist love evangelist and marine mammal apprentice” in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, published this past November. The description […]
BOOK REVIEW
How to Hold Animals Is a Book to Curl Up With
It offers tips for handling furry, slimy, and scaly creatures
The cover of Toshimitsu Matsuhashi’s How to Hold Animals features an adorable sugar glider, a bug-eyed mouse-like creature, gently cupped between two human hands. Readers might therefore expect the book […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Many Faces of Adrienne Rich
Hilary Holladay’s portrait of a complicated artist
Hilary Holladay’s The Power of Adrienne Rich is an accessible biography of the celebrated American poet. Published last month, it is the first comprehensive exploration of both the person and […]
