Page by Page: Book Reviews

“Abnormally Normal” is the leading label of Melissa Joan Hart’s new autobiography, but it’s mostly normally abnormal in ways we’ve come to expect from Hollywood starlets.

Watch Everything explores the career and times of U.S. District Judge Charles A. Shaw as one of three brothers growing up in racially-charged St. Louis, when personal tenacity and collective caution where a way of life.

You may think you know the story behind Auguste Bartholdi’s creation of the Statue of Liberty, but you don’t know the whole story until you read Elizabeth Mitchell’s Liberty’s Torch.

Imperial Japan and the history of psychiatry through an American doctor merge and meld in A Curious Madness.

Crimes against humanity get their own diagnosis in Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and The Psychiatrist, a unique tour through both WWII and the history of mental health.

In The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way, Amanda Ripley is that rare scribe deft enough to move from personal anecdote, to policy, case study, and back again.

Rose George drenches the reader in her ocean-wide chronicle of sea-faring commerce, past and present, but her book’s meandering passages warn you in advance to don a lifejacket.

Adilifu Nama’s book exploration of race among superheroes leaps over the comic history of how black characters entered the genre, but it can’t quite hold its own as a thorough study of the genre.

Its professional definition of design may be outdated, but “GO: A Kidd’s Guide” succeeds in demonstrating a visual sensibility, while supplying basic vocabulary for novices.

How Raymond Edward Maritz harkened back to English country houses and French chateaux to create an architectural style unique to St. Louis, and one that would spread across North America.