The ostensible arc of The Poison Tree takes us from a child’s domination by a ruthless, unyielding father to a successful adult’s enlightenment and forgiveness. But the actual course of the narrative is less straightforward and, as with the poem from which it takes its inspiration, far more unexpected in its outcomes.
Hemmer’s book is a fine scholarly study of rise of modern American conservatism, a more than twice-told story recounted through the less familiar frame of the rise of conservatism’s media.
In first-person narrative, When Women Win tells the invigorating particulars of campaigns waged to get women into the halls of the U.S. Congress, and how EMILY’s list grew from “an annoying thorn in the side of the old boys’ network of the Democratic Party to a powerful and highly valuable partner that was absolutely essential to the party’s success.”
Zimmer's book documents well how green fluorescent proteins (GFPs) join (often, literally) a long line of ever-evolving visualization techniques and radiological innovation that continue to modify how we view ourselves, both in the pages of academic journals and in the vernacular.
Whether as audience members, scholars, or performers, women have been in short supply throughout jazz history. The representation of jazz in the films La La Land (2016) and Whiplash (2014), by director and writer Damien Chazelle, demonstrates this problem clearly.
The world that compositions about Joan of Arc evoke is filled with angels and demons, kings and clerics, bells and disembodied voices, and their musical interpretations reveal striking details about how the modern age looks back on the mysterious medieval world Joan inhabited.
Rapper T.I. tunes listeners’ ears backward in time, to the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the death of Martin Luther King Jr., but also forward to our current time in which he believes white supremacy "is covertly done."
William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal were each other’s opposite because they were nearly identical twins in many respects. As a result, their 1968 confrontations would establish the template for televised political exchanges of the future.
Lerner describes the “bitter logic” of poetry, where a gap always exists between what an individual poem strives to do (“the actual”) and the abstract potential of the medium of poetry itself (“the virtual”). But can that gap be responsible for the enmity many of feel toward poetry itself?
Gallows humor is one thing, but at times Grunt succumbs to camp, which is to say it indulges in its own questionable taste.