Page by Page: Book Reviews

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.

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.

Fine as Garb’s book about African American Chicago is, it does not quite come to terms with a critical shift in political perspective, or the instances in which victory proved to be more a constriction than culmination.

A keystone of the Chicano literature revival, along with a more recent novel about Mexican American social mobility, form a grand legacy awaiting our discovery.

In a country where art history is, at the earliest, taught in the high school AP level (and even then, rarely), this book series will prove invaluable for getting children excited about art.

I should probably make it clear from the outset of this review that I am a Paul guy. In that most vexing of cultural divides, I would (begrudgingly) choose “I’ve Just Seen a Face” over “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Ram over Plastic Ono Band, a Höfner violin bass over a black Rickenbacker. My obsession with all things […]