RaveThe Arts FuseIf you love Sarah Ruhl’s plays as I do...you will be happy to spend time listening to the playwright speaking in her own voice ... As in many of her plays, Ruhl muses about so many disparate things that Smile reads less like a medical memoir and more like a series of far-flung jazz riffs on a theme to which she returns every few chapters ... If you are looking for a medical memoir about learning to live with Bell’s Palsy, you will be frustrated with this book and find it rambling and all over the place. If, however, you love Ruhl’s voice and sensibility, you will enjoy spending time with her, no matter where she decides to take you ... This is the voice of a wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, patient, and author who wrote a memoir on her own terms. I can’t wait for Ruhl’s next play.
Mark Harris
PositiveThe Arts Fuse... a closely detailed, comprehensive portrait by a biographer riveted, as many of us are, by his charismatic subject ... I was ready to read much more about those early years, especially how Nichols first became interested in horses at a local stable. But Harris chose to take his cue from his subject, who said many times and in many ways, \'Yes, I had a tough childhood — but enough already…Let’s start now\' ... Though I occasionally wondered why I was reading details about such forgotten films as The Day of the Dolphin, The Fortune, and Wolf — instead of an analysis of Nichols’s indifference to the politics of the time — I was pleased to be in the hands of a biographer clear about his intentions, who would not get lost in the weeds ... If overwhelming to the reader, how much more overwhelming this material and network of relationships was for the biographer, who not only had to organize this enormous and formidable cast of characters but had to socialize with many of them in New York after the book was published. Although I wish Harris had probed more deeply into the workings of those relationships, there is more than enough content in this biography to chew on. I did not skim a single page of Mike Nichols: A Life.
Anne Applebaum
MixedThe Arts FuseIf anyone is well-placed to write about the global rise of authoritarian regimes and their polarization of society, it is Applebaum. I thought this would be a meaty book, but I was surprised that the slim volume read more like a longer version of one of her Atlantic Magazine articles ... Toggling back and forth from gossipy vignettes to weighty historical allusions to contemporary political analysis, her narrative reads more like an unusually intelligent and international dinner party conversation than a serious book ... Despite Applebaum’s very personal beginning, the reader doesn’t get to know anyone at the parties, including the author, in any depth ... What Twilight of Democracy lacks in depth, however, it makes up for in breadth. This slender book highlights ideas about political matters from Plato to historian Timothy Snyder, who distinguishes between Orwell’s Big Lie and the Medium-Size lie ... a highly readable extended essay that leaves her basic questions unanswered.
Vivian Gornick
PositiveThe Arts FuseGornick acknowledges that she has written about and quoted from several authors in this book before; they have been her literary companions at successive stages in her adult life. They comprise a group that is as idiosyncratic as Gornick’s perspective ... If you’ve never heard Gornick’s own intimate, passionate voice, take a listen ... Gornick seems to take for granted that her younger readers will be as captivated by his work as she was on repeated readings. She’s not inclined to widen her intense narrow focus on text and self and dive into an examination of the cultural and social contexts in which his novels were written and read. As a result, this chapter reads a bit like a museum piece ... Gornick’s description of Ginzburg’s books and essays (that I had picked up several times in the past but not found intriguing was so compelling that I drove to my local library and borrowed all of them ... a rewarding read, but as always when I finish one of Gornick’s books, it but left me wishing for more from this forthcoming, but ultimately very private, journalist.
Martha Ackmann
PositiveThe Arts FuseMany rigorous biographers and literary historians have examined Dickinson’s life and writings, but from the first page of Martha Ackmann’s new book, you know you’re reading something entirely different: a set of evocative yet grounded-in-detail essays, each of which recreate one of Emily Dickinson’s days, yet range freely over her writing, thoughts, horticulture, religion, current events ... Other biographers may have done similar things but none to my knowledge has made the ingenious choice of beginning each chapter with a meteorological epigraph so that the reader could have a sense of the weather on a particular day ... Some of Ackmann’s essays are, of course, better than others. There are few dramatic encounters and the author must rely mostly on letters to reconstruct the poet’s many elusive relationships with family members, friends, and correspondents. The first chapter, built around 14-year-old Emily in the act of writing a letter to her best friend Abiah Root, is so quiet and meandering that, had I not been a reviewer, I might have stopped reading the book right there. But I found Ackmann’s insistence on proceeding in her own eccentric style audacious and fascinating. Sometimes, I was fully conscious of authorial intent; other times I felt lost. But I trusted Ackmann, stuck with her, and found myself immersed in Dickinson’s world — far more than in the recent films about the poet ... the antithesis of a fast read. But its slow, eccentric way of trying to draw nearer to this most enigmatic of poets is admirable and, ultimately, rewarding.
Chanel Miller
RaveThe Art Fuse... extraordinary, no-holds-barred ... It is fair to say that, until now, no author has addressed the issue of sexual assault so much on her own terms, and in such a personal and powerful way ... an of-the-moment as well as timeless story, vividly told, that should be required reading ... not only introduces a new literary voice, it tells a riveting story that will transform many lives.
Scholastique Mukasonga, Trans. by Jordan Stump
RaveThe Arts Fuse\"...a beautifully-composed and evocative survivor’s eulogy ... Mukasonga shows us close up how her mother brings to this project her intelligence and ingenuity as well as the traditions of her culture ... The Barefoot Woman is lyrical but also informative and ethnographic, as much a memoir of a mother as it is of her way of life ... In this memoir, Mukasonga has done far more than remembering and recognizing the human beings she grew up with; she has immortalized them.\
