Reviews

A marriage must be flexible. One is strong while the other flags, then you meet in the middle and run parallel for a while, then the music stops and you switch, fast as a game of musical chairs.

Readers old enough to remember the golden age of magazine and newspaper columns can hold their heads in despair, or they can pick up the latest collection of works by Calvin Trillin, a Missouri native (Kansas City, to be exact) and a master of the form.

How Basketball Can Save the World: 13 Guiding Principles for Reimagining What’s Possible emphasizes the deep connection between basketball and culture, how it fosters connections, and how its principles can shape our interactions with one another. However, Hollander’s argument falls short by often neglecting to address how basketball has also perpetuated the very issues we face as a society.

Edward O’Keefe posits that despite Theodore Roosevelt’s image as a ruggedly individualistic, über-masculine figure, his career was heavily shaped by five women: his mother, two wives, and two sisters. The result is an interesting, though ultimately unsatisfying, book, The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women Who Created A President.

Lawrence Tierney is a solid biography that describes in detail Tierney’s career as an actor, which are the best parts. The worst parts, where the book becomes a slog, are the endless episodes detailing Tierney’s drunken street and bar brawls.

Willis L. Drake was inspired by the example of his father to write Mary Ann Byas-Drake. He was doing what a good father and a good husband should do: Remember his wife and how she affected his life and, more importantly, what her life meant to him.

We always flatter ourselves by the assumption of our own righteous virtue, especially when it is not put to the test. The Dreyfus story, we were told, revealed how precarious assimilation was for racial and religious minorities.

Both Taraborrelli and Anthony reach for an authentic Jackie beneath the layers of scrupulously constructed self-representation populating the archives and historical record. In his preface, Taraborrelli laments that generations of fans, reporters, and the general public have long been “guilty of trying to make her something she was not and never wanted to be–not a mere mortal but, rather, some sort of mythological figure.”

The Forerunner is one of the more important autobiographies written by a St. Louisan. It ought to be read by Democrats, Republicans, and all third-party members. It takes a bit of skill to merge leftist politics, old-time Black evangelical Protestantism, and the supporting craft of nursing into something coherent.

The topic of the Anthropocene is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.