John E. Joseph, “Saussure” (Oxford UP, 2012)
Pretty much everyone who’s done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that’s attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony,...
20 Mai 201350min
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, “Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted” (Simon & Schuster, 2013)
Forty years after its debut, The Mary Tyler Moore Show remains one of the most beloved and successful television sitcoms of all time. But Jennifer Keishin Armstrong‘s Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: A...
30 Apr 201352min
Lisa Chaney, “Coco Chanel: An Intimate Life”
As a reader, biography offers not simply an opportunity to read about the life of another, but also an invitation to ponder the choices that are available in life, the choices that comprise a life. To...
1 Apr 201353min
Carl Rollyson, “Hollywood Enigma: Dana Andrews” (University Press of Mississippi, 2012)
Dana Andrews was one of the major films stars of the 1940s, and yet he was never nominated for an Academy Award. The posterboy for the ‘male mask’ archetype that typified the decade, Andrews portrayed...
15 Feb 201356min
Lois Rudnick, “The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan” (University of New Mexico Press, 2012)
The art salon is sadly less prevalent in our day than in days past, but it is far from obsolete. In its heyday, the salon provided people- particularly women Natalie Barney, orPerle Mesta)- with an ex...
29 Jan 201351min
Chip Bishop, “The Lion and the Journalist: The Unlikely Friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph Bucklin Bishop” (Lyons Press, 2011)
It’s a great advantage of a dual biography that one can draw attention to a significant life that might otherwise be unexamined by linking it to the life of someone famous. Such is the case with Chip ...
15 Jan 201346min
Bob Spitz, “Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child” (Knopf, 2012)
I confess I knew nothing about Julia Child prior to reading Bob Spitz‘s new book. And yet, from the dramatic opening passages through its 500+ pages, Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (Knopf,...
14 Nov 201237min
Jean Zimmerman, “Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
The portrait is startling. Painted by John Singer Sargent, “Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes” depicts a woman dressed casually, almost masculinely, save a voluminous white skirt. Her hand is held braze...
1 Nov 201229min
