Musical Orientation
In Lou Harrison, Bill Alves and Brett Campbell have written an eminently scholarly, fair-minded, and exhaustive biography of a composer they claim enjoyed “one of the richest lives ever lived in American arts.”
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On Disability’s Frontier
In The Province Of The Gods is a finely honed philosophical and autobiographical reflection on transcendence and self-acceptance.
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A Writer and Her Editor
FANS of lesbian icon Jane Rule will celebrate the publication of her letters to a man whom she came to love. Less familiar to U.S. readers, Rick Bébout—editor of the Toronto gay paper The Body Politic and the book Flaunting It: A Decade of Gay Journalism from The Body Politic.
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The Etymology of Lads
Like The Invention of Love, Housman’s Country is a love letter to a vanished time. What the poet cries out for in his final speech in Stoppard’s play is “Oxford in the Golden Age!”
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Indigenous Alien
Despite the predictable but disturbing litany of abuse, Ma-Nee Chacaby emerges as a talented visual artist and a heroic survivor who eventually nurtures both children and adults in need.
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Underground Closet
Once immersed as a soldier in the Weather Underground, whose leaders turned authoritarian and cruel, Jonathan Lerner became fearful of his comrades. Decades later, he has written a memoir about this era titled Swords in the Hands of Children.
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The Dead Are Everywhere
A SEMI-AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL meditation on death, Alistair McCartney’s The Disintegrations has the feeling of a conversation between new friends, exploring the idea of death through several stories.
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More Transitions in Store
THERE ARE many reasons to read Janet Mock’s earlier memoir, Redefining Realness (2014), not least of which is that it serves as a prelude, if not a prerequisite, to reading her new book, Surpassing Certainty.
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The Other France
A coming-of-age story, The End of Eddy describes in graphic detail the tribulations of a gay teenager growing up in the depressed northern region of France during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Huehuetenango
The Black Penguin is a thrilling book not only because Evans survives a bus trip to the bottom of South America but also because the Mormon Church disapproves of his homosexuality—a story that forms, in alternating chapters, a tale as harrowing as his journey to Antarctica.
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