Page by Page: Book Reviews

If we read On the Other Hand as a meditation on the uses of history, we might say that for Kushner, history itself emerges as a left-handed discipline.

If there is not much new on GM agriculture or even on the dynamics of defection, we are not left with much except a deceptive broadside against anti-GMO activism, authenticated only by Lynas’s special standing.

Republican Character reminds readers that the men and women in politics are rarely ideologically consistent, often opportunistic, and sometimes make strange alliances and unappealing compromises.

The Big Picture has a broad yet unmistakable viewpoint regarding the artistic fallout of the trends it chronicles, and that outlook is despairing.

In her twenties, Florence Gould danced in the Folies Bergere. In her thirties, she dazzled her guests in sequined pajamas designed for her by Coco Chanel. In her forties, during WWII, she served as a collaboration grande horizontale for high-ranking Nazis in Paris. In her fifties, as the war ended, she schemed with them to […]

Our Emily Dickinsons covers a truly impressive mix of writers, their eras, their literary and personal histories. Not all of this material is likely to appeal to all readers—but similarly, what does appeal at any given time may be surprising.

Pellett does not shy away from her deep, and sometimes naïve, infatuations with the Chinese revolution that she developed in her formative years in San Francisco as an anti-war and feminist activist, going from St. Louis to Berkeley as a student studying the family revolution in China.

Hawley’s book predates the events in Charlottesville, which means that its value resides not in interpreting that watershed incident but rather in its ability to tell the story of how a movement characterized as leaderless and “almost exclusively an online phenomenon” developed the capacity to organize significant numbers of supporters in physical space.

Any attempt at a comprehensive account of Shelley’s influential text must cover both its origins and afterlives. Frayling’s admirably organized volume does both.

The connections that Sampson makes between Mary and her creature demonstrates the value of framing Mary Shelley’s biography around Frankenstein, because it is the part of her with which we continue to reckon today.