Les Wright
It was the progressive Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenic Record Office, who asserted around 1910 that the “ability to be Americanized” was a genetic trait. He led the scientific call for the sterilization of social defectives and the ...
Paul De Angelis
In the Shadow of No Towers is Art Spiegelman's reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Center. An oversized book, its thick cardboard pages give literal weightiness to its subject matter. It also adds a sense of wistful ...
Phil Freeman
First, there’s the box – the sheer physicality of the thing. It’s slightly smaller than a vinyl album, 9 1/2 inches square and about three inches thick, made of heavy black plastic molded from a hand-carved wooden original. Taking ...
Karren LaLonde Alenier
Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, and the Search for the Real Cho-Cho-San by Jan van Rij is an engaging hobbyist’s project. The author’s thesis— the search for the real Madame Butterfly, also know as Cho-Cho-San—is not a new topic but ...
Phil Freeman
On one episode of Comedy Central's Insomniac, the show's drunken host, Dave Attell, stumbles into a state fair somewhere in middle America. There's a band playing, and he makes it to the side of the stage. Suddenly, he leans ...
Bob Wake
Oblivion is David Foster Wallace’s third and best collection of short stories to date. Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire—which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves—Wallace has added a stronger than usual ...
Bob Wake
Canadian author Michael Redhill spent ten years writing his debut novel, Martin Sloane, published to wide acclaim in 2001. As if challenging himself to master the whole of Henry James’s The Art of the Novel in one fell swoop, ...
Bob Wake
Fifteen years ago, Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line famously resulted in freeing an innocent man from prison. Last year, in what is arguably a comparable turn of events, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary Stone Reader rescued a forgotten American ...
Nancy Chapple
Joan Didion’s The White Album was first published in 1979 and can be considered a follow-up to her Slouching Towards Bethlehem published 11 years earlier. It consists of 20 essays arranged in five sections, including one about California phenomena, ...
Kendal Butler
The Something Might Happen in the title of Julie Myerson’s bleak, haunting not-quite-whodunit seems at first already to have happened: a woman named Lennie has been grotesquely murdered in a seaside village in Suffolk and the police have been ...
