Child Labor and the Pictorialist Ideal George Dimock, Tom Beck, Verna Posever Curtis, and Patricia J. Fanning Weatherspoon Art Gallery ($22.50) by Tim Peterson This volume is the companion to an exhibit which featured photographs by Lewis Hine and by photographers associated with the Pictorialist movement (F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence H. White, and […]
David Finkelstein Pennsylvania State University Press ($55) by John Toren During its heyday in the nineteenth century, William Blackwood & Sons was a major publisher of eminent British novelists and explorers. George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Anthony Trollope were included in its lists. In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein escorts us […]
S. L. Wisenberg University of Nebraska Press ($24.95) by Lisa Lishman “You don't have to be Jewish to be a Holocaust Girl," writes S.L. Wisenberg in her new essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory and Other Obsessions. "But it helps. . . .What matters most is that you must love suffering. You have to pick […]
P. Renée Baernstein Routledge ($27.50) by Charisse Gendron In 1533, in the spirit of the Catholic Reformation, Countess Ludovica Torelli bought a house near Milan for a group of Barnabite monks and female devotees bent on improving morals by doing penance in public. Two years later, the women took nuns' vows and founded San Paolo […]
Rachel Pollack Llewellyn Worldwide ($14.95) by Kris Lawson Rachel Pollack's The Forest of Souls is a metaphysical study detailing a new way of looking at Tarot cards and their use. Pollack—known for her fiction and comics work as well as for her expertise in Tarot—advocates a meditative, almost holistic method of divination. She's even drawn […]
Nick Hornby McSweeney's ($26) by Francis Raven Songbook is essentially a mix tape of novelist Nick Hornby's writings about his favorite pop songs—not albums, not bands, but songs. This is how Hornby parses music; as he writes, "Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else." It sounds like an idea […]
Edmund White Bloomsbury Publishing ($16.95) by Summer Block In The Flâneur, Edmund White navigates a Paris that is increasingly stranded by history. A flâneur is someone who wanders a city, strolling, taking things in, with no preconceptions and no agenda. White is the perfect flaneur—intelligent, perceptive, interested in everything, open to everything. His idiosyncratic observations […]
Gore Vidal Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books ($11.95) by Mark Sorkin In his paperback bestseller Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, published last spring as a belated response to 9/11, Gore Vidal peeled the "evil-doer" label off Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh and pasted it onto the Bush administration. With Dreaming War, he continues to rail […]
Pete Hamill Little, Brown & Company ($25.95) by S. Clayton Moore Pete Hamill has reached a new zenith with his new novel, Forever. It is an epic chronicle not only of the life of a man but the birth of one of America's most vibrant and diverse cities—with all the blood, sacrifices, and human frailties […]
Charles Dickinson Forge Books ($24.95) by Rudi Dornemann Every culture tells stories about fate. The word of an oracle, the decree of a god, represents either an irrevocable doom or an opportunity for some loophole-exploiting trickster to rewrite destiny. Our culture fills this niche with time-travel stories, and these tales generally offer two possible morals. […]