News & Notes

Criticism & Features

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  March 12, 2023

  Elizabeth Taylor
  30 Books
  G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

  In her towering biography of one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history, Beverly Gage tells the story of the quintessential Government Man, John Edgar Hoover. He reigned... Read More

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  March 10, 2023

  David Varno
  30 Books
  Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney

  Consummate essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney’s lively and layered memoir has so much going on—any given page is rich with anecdotes, insights, and searching questions—that it eludes a quick summary.... Read More

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  March 9, 2023

  Elizabeth Taylor
  30 Books
  The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge 

  Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been celebrated as the sisters who came to abhor the slave system upon which their prominent South Carolina slaveholding family’s wealth depended. They defied the... Read More

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  March 8, 2023

  J. Howard Rosier
  30 Books
  Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks

  Though aimed at the literary humanities—the loose cluster of English, philosophy, history, and theological studies that, if current debates are any indication, have fallen on hard times—Peter Brooks’s Seduced by... Read More