Books
418 results
Page 37
Austenmania: Moral fables for modern times
Beneath the cleavage: Jane Austen’s closet feminists
Why are 21st-century Americans attracted to narratives featuring heroines whose economic survival depends upon snaring a wealthy husband? Perhaps because they refuse to be passive victims.
Articles
3 minute read
Robert Weintraub’s ‘The Victory Season’
Baseball, then and now
Robert Weintraub’s The Victory Season looks back to America’s first postwar baseball year, 1946, when the Red Sox and Cardinals faced each other, as this year, in an entertaining World Series. The differences in the game—and in ourselves—are palpable, though.
Articles
7 minute read
Julian Rushton’s ‘Mozart’
The astonishing truth about Mozart
Mozart was a genius, but he was hardly the womanizer and spendthrift of popular mythology. His immense musical talent aside, Mozart was a pretty ordinary guy.
Articles
4 minute read
Ben Urwand’s ‘The Collaboration’
Hitler and Hollywood: Six degrees of separation
I’ve just finished reading a remarkable book— and all sorts of links started coming into my mind. It's the story of Hollywood’s obscene collaboration with Germany in the 1930s— one in a chain of collaborations from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust.
Articles
5 minute read
Tony Auth, survivor
One political cartoon is worth….
In his 40 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tony Auth convinced me that the maturing of the editorial cartoon in America is a sine qua non if we’re ever to mature as a civilized society.
Articles
1 minute read
Richard Burgin’s ‘Hide Island’
A vision of civilized savagery
In Richard Burgin's dark, dystopic vision, human society is mostly an arrangement for predators to seek their prey, and vice versa.
Articles
6 minute read
Jonathan Franzen’s ‘The Kraus Project’
Why was Karl Kraus so angry? Well, you’d angry too if….uh….
Karl Kraus, the Austrian playwright, editor and social critic, was little known to today’s English-speaking audience— until now. Thanks to the novelist and Kraus scholar Jonathan Franzen, the angry old man of German satire lives anew.
Articles
3 minute read
Stephen King’s ‘Joyland’
How Stephen King pushes my buttons
By creating true-to-life characters and nostalgic narratives, Stephen King makes it easy for us to suspend our disbelief about the macabre events in his novels.
Articles
4 minute read
Barbara Streisand’s comeuppance
A Streisand hit, without Streisand
Playwright Jonathan Tolins has transformed the most narcissistic book ever written into a comic masterpiece.
Articles
5 minute read
Saki's "Unrest-Cure': Lampooning Britain's upper class
The defeat of the smug and the boring
Every fan of satire knows Wilde and Wodehouse. But don't forget Saki, who introduced talking cats and child-hungry werewolves into upper-class British drawing rooms, on the theory that nothing invigorates a tea party like a ravening hyena.
Articles
6 minute read