An American writer joins her husband, a contractor/consultant working in Iraq, to live in Amman, Jordan, and keeps a diary of day-to-day events. Out of this emerge so many stories of the pain and frustration of a forgotten world, which precedes the Iraq war, dating from a half-century earlier—the Palestinians who fled Israel in the[read more...]
As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world[read more...]
Winthrop tells the arresting tale—from multiple points of view—of a community locked in struggle with itself. Set during the hours leading up to the scheduled execution of a young black man for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1943 small-town Louisiana, Winthrop expertly captures the intimacy and tension of a town, its people,[read more...]
The story of how one woman’s long love affair with New York’s Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life–a middle-class[read more...]
What makes a university great? Its faculty? Its students? Its curriculum? All three to be sure. But also its architecture. Great buildings inspire. They transform how we think, how we see, how we learn—how we act. No one who enters the cathedral of Chartres is the same person coming out. Too often architectural critics focus[read more...]