Page by Page: Book Reviews

A Law Supreme

The Roberts Court elevates the “how conservative?” question to a heightened pitch. The conservatism meme, though, presents a problem for serious analysts like Tribe and Coyle. The court is not supposed to be a political actor. We expect the justices to provide reasoned grounds for their decisions. That expectation is not wrong—judicial reasoning is a real thing—but neither is it simple.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

To say a work of thorough research “reads like a novel” can be a dubious accolade. But it is true, and true only in good ways, of A Spy Among Friends. It does read like a novel—or, perhaps more appropriately, like a thriller.

Hue, Eye and Tongue

Few linguists share comparable command of the plethora of languages that are vividly and routinely on display throughout Deutscher’s text. The work is bold, ambitious, and strives to combine insights from history, classical studies, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, biology, and physiology, to address the recurring intellectually perplexing conundrum regarding ways that language may shape thought. In the final analysis, however, this book is an argument in favor of multidisciplinary approaches to analyses that strive to examine the inevitably complex relationship between language and cognition.

Black Holes Matter

Bartusiak’s book provides a surprising wealth of well-documented information, making frequent use of analogies and word images to comprehend what is almost incomprehensible.

The Missouri Breaks

Greenspan’s biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown’s life. More than a time-line, Greenspan’s contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.

Southern Comic Valentine

There was something about Mayberry that evoked a kind of Southern nowhere-ness. It was the not the New South of Henry Grady, not the romanticized South of a natural and benign unequal social order like Thomas Nelson page’s. How could Mayberry be that when it had, amazingly, no black people?

Tourist Street With a Backbeat

Bourbon Street: A History takes a single street as its focus to reveal the multiple overlaps and interrelations of different cultures and different histories. This method has its costs, at times exchanging topical breadth for depth.

Ten Easy Pieces

Marcus’s chosen form, media’s coveted “listicle,” is of the moment. But, at first glance, his subject matter is not. Who even talks about “rock ’n’ roll” anymore?