Page by Page: Book Reviews

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.

Alou is one of the best baseball autobiographies of recent years because it offers the story of race and baseball not from a non-American perspective, but from someone who got to know the United States very well as both a resident and a subject of its foreign policy, as both insider and outsider.

The most extraordinary thing about Amiable is that it was ever rescued from hiding. As the novel’s scrupulous and publicity-savvy editors suggest, “the discovery of an unpublished and previously unknown manuscript by a major modern writer is a rare occurrence.”

Most scholarly professionals, linguists and non-linguists alike, suffer from the occasional (or not so occasional) feeling that what they do is meaningless, having no direct, positive impact on their fellow man. The overall message of Baugh’s book will inspire them otherwise.