East of Eden book by John Steinbeck reviewed by Jia Lynn Yang
Peter Ibbetson
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…
Summer03
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 Joshua Foer
“We have arrived at the Brave New World that seemed so distant in 1932, when Aldous Huxley wrote about human beings being born in what he called a `hatchery.’” So…