November-December 2018
Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team behind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousness for its Broadway debut in November at the Neil Simon Theatre.
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SET in the years following the Civil War in an unnamed state, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a Western that begins with Jessilyn Harney recalling that her mother died when giving birth to her, leaving her father to raise her and her brother Noah …
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As to why she titled her book as she did, Tea explains it in several essays. In “Polishness” she concludes: “Anyone would get sick and tired of doing the same thing for seventeen years. When a memoir is what you’ve been doing. It means you’ve become horribly sick of yourself, of your narrative, and I had.”
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The strength of The Children of Harvey Milk is the very detailed stories of legislators in the North Atlantic world whom Reynolds interviewed, often providing us with more detail than a reader can assimilate.
MoreThese two books are not the place where someone unfamilar with Warhol’s œuvre should dive in. Flatley’s prose can sometimes lapse into postmodernist verbosity and opaqueness, a scholarly idiom that this reader found at time impossible to penetrate. Nevertheless, each essay makes a serious and valuable contribution to Warhol studies. The illustrations alone are well worth the price of these (somewhat expensive) volumes.
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Book reviews of Read by Strangers: Stories, She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak, Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and the Classical Tradition, The Great Believers, and Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940; and the movie Juliet, Naked.
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So much happens in this beautifully rendered novel. The South comes to life in the way we have come to expect of Southern writers. Blanche Boyd does not overlook essential Southern themes—American themes, really—such as race and historical memory. Some mysteries are “cozies” in which a sweet lady detective pours lavender tea and reveals that the vicar did it. Tomb of the Unknown Racist is a not-cozy: sensibilities are not spared. The vigilant reader is thus rewarded.
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Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography in which Perry expresses her feelings of oneness with Hansberry through similarities in their backgrounds and reactions to political events. The book also offers critiques of many of Hansberry’s works, both published and unpublished.
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Berenice Abbott remains a major influence in photography today. Her work is visually breathtaking—immediate, clear, and indelible. Van Haaften has written a book that’s a major resource for fans of urban and architectural photography.
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The description of the fire, pieced together bit by bit from interviews with survivors and archival research, is so painstakingly done that it’s hard to read. AIDS, in the next decade, was a horrifying shock; but in this fire there was no time to process one’s fate or come to terms with death, much less bargain with it, or try out medicines; it all happened in an instant …
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