John McWhorter’s pushback against the antiracist orthodoxy of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi lands palpable hits but is too scattered to win the match.
Breaking form with his latest work, Crossroads, Franzen has not written a social novel. He has written an Antisocial Novel.
Shane Weller’s The Idea of Europe, hampered by an unconscious form of Euroscepticism, suggests that British critics are still not ready to listen to their neighbors.
Cathy Curtis has published four biographies in six years but her recent work on Elizabeth Hardwick is missing a strong point of view.
Cypel’s The State of Israel vs. the Jews addresses the prejudices embedded in Israeli policies toward Palestinians and their implications for Jews worldwide.
John Milward’s new history of Americana puts the mixed genre at the corner of country and rock while slighting race and the music’s Black roots and performers.
Kyle Devine’s Decomposed is a landmark contribution to musicology, offering a sobering but sorely needed account of recorded music’s environmental consequences.
For intellectual historian Louis Menand, the Cold War gave rise to prospects and paradoxes in America, and Art was given status through essential criticism.
Michael Gray is the Bob Dylan of Dylan studies, a man whose Dylan criticism has done more to augment and illuminate Dylan’s art than all of his rivals combined.
Simone de Beauvoir’s Inseparable reveals the devastating consequences of succumbing to conventions at the expense of one’s own autonomy and well-being.
As always, Daphne Gottlieb’s excellent Saint 1001 will please all of her readers – hetero and queer. Does that make her work “not queer enough” for Lambda?
Michael W. Clune argues that a popular mantra about art – everyone’s judgment is equal – impedes our ability to imagine a world outside of the capitalist marketplace.
