Page by Page: Book Reviews

Slaughterhouse demonstrates how the stockyards district is once more at the forefront of innovation in food production and the use of urban space, again making Chicago a showplace for the future.

For readers interested in concert pianists, Van Cliburn and his story enrich our understanding of how classical musicians developed their careers against the backdrop of the Cold War. For those drawn to this book more out of interest in political history, Nigel Cliff shows that musicians’ stories can give us perspective on the private and public faces of this conflict.

Cop Under Fire is a rambling monologue, aggressively expressed if not always cogently persuasive as a set of arguments. It would serve Clarke adequately as a campaign book as it expounds his policy views in a number of areas, some only tangentially related, at best, to law enforcement.

While Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane is one of the most beloved and frequently taught and dissected works in American film history, Lebo is careful to remind readers that the film’s success was anything but a foregone conclusion.

Although Ellis Cashmore at times overstates Taylor’s influence his book Elizabeth Taylor is, at its best, as much about the public lives of the many people surrounding Taylor as it is about Taylor herself.

While Downs adds to the historical record detailed information about community and religious groups working with gay men in prison, his main objective in Stand By Me is to show how all of these sites of community formation, even those outside of urban areas, were part of gay liberation. This is his book’s greatest argumentative strength.

The author is at his best when piecing together anecdotes about a particular dancer’s life experiences or performance/creation process. Countless examples of this are in his book, which is why the text is still worth reading and valuable to dance.

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.