In Ruins book by Christopher Woodward reviewed by Andrew Kau
Peter Ibbetson
In a lighthearted reference, Christopher Woodward begins his book with the image of Charlton Heston finding the ruins of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes—an image prefigured…
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Jazz Modernism from Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce book by Alfred Appel Jr. reviewed by Jessica Tanenbaum
Though many jazz enthusiasts would agree that classic jazz belongs to the modern art tradition, until now no author had completed a comprehensive analysis of jazz through this lens. Alfred…
So What: The Life of Miles Davis book by John Szwed reviewed by Tom Isler
They are the kind of words that give record producers ulcers and bald heads: “Hey, I don’t have my horn.” On March 29, 1954, Miles Davis uttered that phrase to…
The Great Tax Wars: From Lincoln to T.R. to Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America book by Steven Weismann reviewed by Susannah Camic
Albert Einstein once said that “the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” In The Great Tax Wars, Steven Weisman attempts to prove Einstein wrong as…
The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi: The World’s Most Astonishing Number book by Mario Livio reviewed by Christopher Grobe
What do a rose, a falcon’s spiral descent, and Salvador Dali’s “Sacrament of the Last Supper” have in common? As Mario Livio explains, they all share a connection to phi,…
Erasmus and the Age of Reformation book by Johan Huizinga reviewed by Susannah Rutherglen
Johan Huizinga, the great historian of late medieval culture, was one of those rare figures in the study of ideas whose own stature and sensibility easily matched those of his…
Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories book by A.M. Holmes reviewed by Katherine Poltorak
“I am lost”—a short sentence in the first paragraph of “The Chinese Lesson”— sums up the main theme of A.M. Homes’s latest collection of short stories, Things You Should Know.…
Prague book by Arthur Phillips reviewed by Conor O’Toole
Among this novel’s unexpected features is its setting: not Prague but Budapest, Hungary, in 1990. There, a collection of North American expatriates soaks up a bit of the newly reformed…
You Shall Know Our Velocity book by David Eggers reviewed by Alexander Benaim
David Eggers’s fiction debut “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” falls staggeringly short of the high mark set by his best-selling memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.” In “Genius,” Eggers…
Versailles: A Novel book by Kathryn Davis reviewed by Sophie Pinkham
In the summers of my youth, I devoured my father’s old children’s books. Among these was a collection of historical novels from the 1950s, each with the more unsavory details…