The Da Vinci Code book by Dan Brown reviewed by Marissa Ain
Peter Ibbetson
The latest art history mystery by Dan Brown is a fast-paced book that is hard to put down. With deliciously short chapters that usually end in cliff-hangers, The Da Vinci…
July 2013
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix book by J.K. Rowling reviewed by Emma Pollack-Pelzner
A few weeks ago I mentioned to a group of friends that I was working on a review of the new Harry Potter book. Most of them scoffed and tittered,…
Samaritan book by Richard Price reviewed by Dan Mattingly
Read the first few pages of Samaritan, Richard Price’s latest epistle from the ghetto, and it’s clear Price wants this book to be a serious thriller. It begins with a…
East of Eden book by John Steinbeck reviewed by Jia Lynn Yang
The buzz on books this summer was all about the non-revelations of a former first lady who stuck by her philandering man and a kid wizard’s new adolescent angst. But…
Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor book by Paul Farmer reviewed by Ramnath Subbaraman
Despite the remarkable advances in medical knowledge made during the 20th century, the health of the world’s poor has rarely been in such jeopardy. The global AIDS epidemic constitutes the…
The Language Police book by Diane Ravitch reviewed by Toby Merrill
In the aftermath of the Lacedaemonian revolution, Thucydides writes, “Words had to change their meanings and take on those which were now given them.” Diane Ravitch’s Language Police explores the…
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology edited by David L. Ulin reviewed by Alex Lee
Five years ago, the Los Angeles Public Library started a new line of posters, featuring a large picture of a library card, with the slogan “a sign of intelligent life…
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books book by Azar Nafisi reviewed by Sonja Ostrow
Fiction was not a panacea,” Azar Nafisi writes late in Reading Lolita in Tehran, “but it did offer us a critical way of appraising and grasping the world—not just our…
Finis by Elizabeth Archibald
Like many of my classmates, I have spent a large percentage of senior year wondering what my Yale education adds up to and which career paths are still open to…
Surreality TV by Raina Lipsitz
“I wish I could have been different with Aaron,” says a tearful Angela as she is driven away from the harem house of ABC’s “The Bachelor.” The large, black limousine…