BOOK REVIEWS

The Beauty of Choice

By Wendy Steiner

 

To me, the book read like a series of disconnected lectures by a professor out to dazzle an audience. 

Read the review in Arts Fuse

The Mirror and the Palette

The Mirror and the Palette

By Jennifer Higgie

 

An engrossing account of five hundred years of women’s self-portraiture. 

Read the review in Arts Fuse.

The Heart

The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris

By Marc Petitjean

 

When the author learns of his father’s affair with Frida Kahlo, he sets out to explore her life and art, and what the events in 1939 meant to his father.  

Read the review in Arts Fuse.

Black Sunday

Black Sunday

By Tola Rotimi Abraham

 

Debut novelist Tola Rotimi Abraham explores the linkage of sex, money, religion and power in the lives of two Nigerian girls.

Read the review in Ploughshares.

MOTHER IS A VERB

By Sarah Knott

 

Historian Sarah Knott draws on anecdote, oral history, poetry, statistics and personal experience to paint this picture of mothers’ experiences across the centuries.

Read the review in Ploughshares.

BLACK IS THE BODY

By Emily Bernard

 

In these essays, Emily Bernard creates a memoir of her life as a girl in Nashville, graduate student at Yale and now mother, wife, friend and professor at University of Vermont. At the border where black and white Americans meet, she finds fear, anger, understanding and love.        

Read the review in Ploughshares.

THE ENSEMBLE

By Aja Gabel

 

The Ensemble follows the principals of a string quartet from their student days into middle adulthood. Without ever sounding pretentious, Aja Gabel contemplates how her characters make meaning in their lives.

Read the review in Ploughshares.   

the-art-of-the-wasted-day-patricia-hampl-book-review-kathleen-c-stone

THE ART OF THE WASTED DAY

By Patricia Hampl

 

Patricia Hampl has previously written about childhood, parochial school, her father, her Czech extended family, works of art she loves and the essayist Montaigne. In her most recent set of essays she dips into all of that, but adds a portrait of her husband, written from her new perspective as a recent widow.  

Read the review in Ploughshares.