Page by Page: Book Reviews

A new book on medicine’s front-line workers takes readers deep into an intense, dangerous world still largely dominated by women. It is also a world where their professional concerns are left unaddressed.

At the time of that 2012 election, Claire McCaskill and her campaign were circumspect about the motive behind taking out ads during the Republican primary accusing Akin of being too conservative for Missouri, but she lays it all out in her very readable, and revealing, political memoir.

Beyond the photo, there is little known about Private Lewis Martin, also known as “Louis Martin,” but Heyworth seems to have found what little there is, and that little is actually of some importance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir, a personal and historical account of upper middle-class black family life in 1950s and 1960s Chicago, the colorline is something that must be learned.

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.

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?