Non-Fiction Reviews
The Great Dinosaur Discoveries by Darren Naish
April 17, 2025Naish states that “most dinosaur books look at current views on dinosaurs and briefly recap the...
Fiction Reviews
Flesh and Fire: Book One of the Vineart War by Laura Anne Gilman
April 17, 2025The first clue that Gilman is not going to zing this story along with Tom Clancy...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Churchill by Paul Johnson
April 16, 2025And Johnson reminds us of the memorable words he spoke after France capitulated: “Let us therefore...
Movies
Movie Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox
April 16, 2025Fantastic Mr. Fox is a pleasant return to classic stop-motion animation, a technique little used anymore....
Architecture
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
April 15, 2025Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Movies
Movie Review: The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
April 15, 2025Robin Wright plays Pippa, a beautiful, pastel-clad homemaker nearing her 50s. As the movie opens, her...
Movies & TV
Movie Review: Me and Orson Welles
April 15, 2025Based on the novel by Richard Kaplow, Welles stars Efron as Richard Samuels, a student and...
Fiction Reviews
Love and Summer by William Trevor
April 15, 2025Why is it that summer can never last forever, especially when we want it to? The...
Movies
Movie Review: New Moon
April 15, 2025The movie positively drags at two hours eleven minutes; when the kids at the front of...
Movies
Movie Review: Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire
April 15, 2025Comedian Mo’Nique, best known for urban comedies like Phat Girlz and Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, gives...
Art
Directions: John Gerrard at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
April 14, 2025So what are today’s landscape artists telling us? In his eponymous show at the Hirshhorn, John...
Fiction Reviews
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
April 14, 2025Even so, to hold The Lacuna in one’s hand, to read it, is to witness and...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Messenger: The Legacy of Mattie J.T. Stepanek and Heartsongs by Jeni Stepanek
April 14, 2025He explains it in his journals as “Whatever it is that a person needs or wants,...
Movies
Movie Review: Pirate Radio
April 14, 2025Aside from the lack of a true protagonist, a number of small story arcs fall a...
Non-Fiction Reviews
My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran by Haleh Esfandiari
April 13, 2025Her jail term of one hundred and five days was the culmination of an eight-month ordeal....
Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
April 13, 2025The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Horror
Under the Dome by Stephen King
April 13, 2025Still, despite the ending, this is King’s best work in years, a richly textured novel of...
Movies
Movie Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats
April 13, 2025Imagine a world in which the military trains soldiers not to kill enemies of the state,...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey
April 13, 2025The 19th century science known as phrenology — which posited that the human skull conforms to...
Fiction Reviews
The Scarpetta Factor by Patricia Cornwell
April 12, 2025She’s developed an enjoyable way of beginning novels in the middle of a story, letting her...
Architecture
Paul Bril’s Restored Paintings in the San Silvestro Chapel at Rome’s Sancta Sanctorum
April 15, 2025Born in Antwerp in 1554, Bril was working in Italy at the end of the century,...
Art
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
April 13, 2025The people of that ancient nation had been decimated in the opening genocide of modern times,...
Non-Fiction Reviews
In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder
April 12, 2025Orson had become so famous for his villainous role as Harry Lime in The Third Man...
Art
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola at the National Portrait Gallery, London
April 2, 2025Perhaps what fascinated him about these portraits was that they show this urge to create and...
Art
Tim Burton at MoMA
April 17, 2025Predictably, Tim Burton is already a wildly popular show. As throngs of families, film buffs and...
Movies
Marlee Matlin: Bold Moves and Few Regrets
March 28, 2025"I worry about nothing except doing work that I like and that I look at as...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
April 8, 2025Never perhaps has there been such a masterful account of the man’s failures—and successes—in this country’s...
Art
The Barnes Foundation: Beauty Surrounded by Controversy
April 8, 2025And what a treasure trove! By the time of his death in 1951, Barnes had purchased...
Art
Ron Arad: No Discipline at MoMA
April 4, 2025The experience of viewing “No Discipline,” the first major U.S. retrospective of the virtuosic, Israeli-born designer...
Graphic Novels
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
April 6, 2025But, as we see in the terrifying drawings of his radiologist father giving him neck adjustments—“kkrraackk,”...