Page by Page: Book Reviews

Few historians so aptly make Grant and his time so legible to a 21st-century readership that continues to grapple with the political legacies of slavery and the Civil War.

In an engaging, well-written, exhaustively-researched, even-handed, and insightful book, Patrick Iber not only brings to light previously obscure aspects of this story but also details the complexities and contradictions that bedeviled all sides of the struggle.

Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood’s publication of record for prurient interests.

Day’s characters seemed to give her fans not only a coping fantasy but a sense of inspiration. One of the problems with the intelligentsia is that it will not respect or take seriously any fantasy that is not built on some idea or resistance to hegemony, which Day’s fantasy clearly was not.

The OO7 Diaries reveals filmmaking as both a nearly heroic exercise in tenacity and an astonishingly pure expression of absurdity.

If at times we are perplexed and frustrated by Frederick Douglass and other times galvanized and inspired, it is only because he lived in our most perplexing and frustrating time as a nation.

Fitzharris takes readers from the pre-Listerian surgical theaters replete with pathogenic microorganisms and decaying bodies to sterile hospital wards filled with recovering patients.

Sernovitz’s goal is to tell us all about “fracking” for oil and gas, and how it is not only inevitable and good but actually something close to God’s work. Fasten your seatbelt.

Dunn more or less meets the bar he has set for himself. The question then becomes how a reader comes to terms with a poet who seems content with the strategies and forms he has cultivated for himself.

One of the great achievements of this book is to show England being taken down a road not of its formidable ruler’s choosing.