Reviews Archives

7 min

The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine

Ben Ehrenreich, on assignment for Harper’s magazine, went to Palestine’s West Bank in 2011 to report on Israel’s water war with Palestine. The Way to the Spring is based on his eye-witness account of life in the West Bank—in the village of Nabi Saleh and the cities of Hebron and Ramallah.

6 min

The End of Your Life Book Club

There is great value in reading a book about books, and The End of Your Life Book Club is no exception. This book is different in one respect, however. It…

14 min

The Longest War

Consider 9/11 and the Arab Spring of 2011 as opposing bookends to a decade of repression, fear, and fetishized violence. 9/11—the worst terrorist attack on United States soil—killed nearly 3,000…

6 min

Creature

The mind—or body or self—is central to Amina Cain’s storytelling. This is the way it is with Creature, her collection of fourteen stories: elusive, introspective, intuitive. Stylistically, Cain absolves the…

2 min

Loving Day

“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.” As soon as I read this first sentence of Loving Day by Mat Johnson I sighed and…

The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban The Bomb

Unless you are a World War II history buff, you may have missed the fact that the island of Tinian in the Northern Mariana Islands played an important role in…

My Beloved World

You would be remiss if you didn’t ask how Justice Sotomayor transcended the adversity of her childhood: dangerous neighborhoods, chronic poverty, an alcoholic father, an unhappy mother. Yet My Beloved World is a memoir suffused with gratitude, generosity, and love.

5 min

Music and the Armenian Diaspora

Big Band music saved my sanity during an especially stressful time in my life. I was working long hours, seven days a week, on a high-stakes project. I actually liked…

3 min

The Stick Soldiers

This collection of poems is not light reading but it is necessary reading if we are to heal the wounds of war and shorten the divide in our country.

The Long Emancipation

As discussed by the scholar Ira Berlin in his monograph The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States, the struggle for freedom is, at its core, about…

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