Page by Page: Book Reviews

The Show of Shows

Kevin Cook writes an informative, insightful biography of Comedian Flip Wilson, the first black entertainer to successfully host a TV variety show. Gerald Early reviews Flip: The Inside Story of TV’s First Black Superstar.

Food Fights

The short, but dense, Something to Chew On serves up no-nonsense, stimulating fare over a range of food controversies, from GMOs to weight-loss and world hunger. Digest it if you dare.

District Restoration

Working against sometimes clunky prose, but with an eye on posterity, Washington D.C.’s most (in)famous mayor tells his story of power, the temptations of power, and his legacy forgotten amidst scandal.

Drawing From the Welles

The majesty, intelligence, pettiness and prowess of the film world’s famous boy genius and might-have-been is revealed—appetite and all—in the tape recorded pages of Henry Jaglom’s My Lunches With Orson.

Django Done Right

Despite moments of tone-deafness, the graphic novel treatment of Django animates the ethical puzzle of Tarantino’s film with static vigor, and color to spare.

Tales From TV Queendom

“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.

Raised in Vigilance

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.

Taking Liberty

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.

Nazis in Therapy

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.