History
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Book Review
THE LAST OF THE DOUGHBOYS, by Richard Rubin. Ten years ago, Rubin set out to ask men at the very end of their lives to describe events from the beginning.
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Book Review
Skepticism was limited only by a writer’s boldness. What if instead of something in the heavens, there was nothing? Without God, what might man become?
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Book Review
COLLEGE OF ONE, by Sheilah Graham. The Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who became F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lover, shaped herself out of nothing much, and she knew it.
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Book Review
SHRAPNEL by William Wharton. Shrapnel wounds haphazardly—it can glance off the surface or lodge deep in the body. In William Wharton’s World War II memoir, it becomes a metaphor for the war’s psychic impact.
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Book Review
THE GIRLS OF ATOMIC CITY, by Denise Kiernan. Kiernan’s characters represent a cross-section of the society of Oak Ridge, whose roles ranged from janitors, nurses, and secretaries to mathematicians, chemists, and physicists.
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Book Review
DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES, by Mary M. and Bryan Talbot. Like Lucia Joyce, Mary learns early on that her father’s work means that his moods and outbursts must be quietly tolerated.
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Book Review
THE BLACK COUNT, by Tom Reiss. On being told that God had taken the man he idolized, little Alexandre shouldered one of his father’s guns and announced that he was going to heaven “to kill God, who killed Daddy.”
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Book Review
CEZANNE: A LIFE, by Alex Danchev. Cézanne looked at the world by looking at the objects, sitter, or landscape in front of him, and was entirely consumed by the struggle to understand it through his brushstrokes, colors, lines, and planes.
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Book Review
CRUSOE, by Katherine Frank. The wrecking of a vessel on a remote island is an evergreen beginning for stories about what makes us civilized and human.
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Book Review
THE LIVES OF MARGARET FULLER, by John Matteson. By beginning with Fuller’s death — “Think first of endings” — Matteson purposely overshadows the book with a sense of loss.
