Reviews Archives - Page 5 of 17

Reviews

A World in Motion

A review of Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

May 17, 2023 • by Palak Godara

Bhanoo evokes not the spectacular scenes of people in motion that fill the news, but the ordinary and everyday events that make up lives in migration, and how the lives of Indian and Indian American women have changed over the years....

Reviews

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?

January 24, 2023 • by Alla Anatsko

What The Morgan gets right is showing us how The Little Prince took shape from day one...

<em>The Little Prince</em> and the Allure of Sadness

Film & Performing Arts

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

October 5, 2022 • by Hannah H. Kim

The problem of Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t just that Alithea, our unfortunate representative, is unimaginative; the plot suggests the humanities have no natural home in the twenty-first century....

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

Reviews

Burning Cities

The Natural History of Destruction examines the European bombing campaigns of WWII with provocative disregard for convention

July 27, 2022 • by Altair Brandon-Salmon

Part of the film’s thrill is its boldness in posing these ethical questions through sound and imagery. He makes them come alive through his fictionalizing interventions into the archival material, with the extensive foley work and the assemblage of disparate material. It is, dare I say it, entertaining. Destruction is ...

Reviews

The Bloody Autumn of Butcher’s Crossing

July 27, 2022 • by Naomi Oreskes

The following is an excerpt from an essay first appeared in Social Research: An International Quarterly. It is part of the journal’s summer 2022 issue, Books That Matter II. The most famous environmental book ever written in America is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, published in 1962. But just two years before, ...

Reviews

My Life in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

July 27, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

My mother seemed to me, when I was a child, a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. She was, like the Queen of Hearts, idiosyncratic and imperious, someone with whom you could never win an argument, even when you knew you were right and she was ...

Reviews

James Joyce’s Ulysses at 100

An exhibition at the Morgan Library

July 8, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

One hundred years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris. This year, the Morgan Library in New York is celebrating with a remarkable exhibition, “One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” on display until October 2. ...

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

Reviews

Titane: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

The winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or takes us through hell and out the other side

November 3, 2021 • by Melinda Freudenberger

The following review contains spoilers. My friend has a phrase she likes to use about her new dog. “I look at him from across the room,” she says, after talking to me about all the piss pads littering her apartment floor, “and I can tell he’s having bad dog thoughts.” Something ...

<em>Titane</em>: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

Film & Performing Arts

Faculty TeeVee

In the Netflix series The Chair, Sandra Oh is charged with a Sisyphean task: an English department faculty in decline. Spoiler alerts!

August 20, 2021 • by Claire Potter

_____ It’s such a setup, and one of Dr. Ji-Yoon Kim’s colleagues knows it. As Dr. Kim settles into her office as the first woman—the first woman of color, no less—to chair the English department at the fictional Pembroke University, a package awaits her. It is a nameplate for her desk which ...

Feminism

More Misandry, Please!

France Needs More Man-Haters—but Pauline Harmange doesn’t seem to be one of them

April 28, 2021 • by Hannah Leffingwell

_____ The cover of French feminist Pauline Harmange’s recent book I Hate Men (Fourth Estate, 2021, translated by Natasha Lehrer) prepares the reader for a salacious world of feminist intrigue, and a no-holds barred misandrist rant for the ages. Arranged in bold block letters over a neon yellow background, the title ...

Gender

Cis Lit and the Trans Writer

On Torrey Peters and the possibilities for trans girl fiction

January 12, 2021 • by McKenzie Wark

What would happen if we took seriously the perspectives of trans people, and allowed them to potentially transform how we see the whole of gender? Detransition, Baby is a book about what cis and trans women might have to say to each other. It does allow a certain amount of cis tourism ...