Book Reviews

Stella Maris book cover

Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. 190 pages. $26.00.

Juan de Pareja book cover

Juan de Pareja: Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez

David Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés with essays by Luis Méndez Rodriguez and Erin Kathleen Rowe. The Metropolitan Museums of Art, 2023. 176 pages. $50.00.

Algeria book cover

Algeria:  Politics and Society from the Dark Decade to the Hirak 

Michael J. Willis. Oxford University Press, 2022. 320 pages. $60.00.

Read Until You Understand book cover

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Farah Jasmine Griffin. W.W. Norton & Company, 2021. 258 pages. $26.95. Winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

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A History of Treason: A Bloody History of Britain Through the Stories of its Most Notorious Traitors

The National Archives – Chris Day, Daniel Gosling, Neil Johnston, and Euan Roger. John Blake Publishing, 2022. 432 pages. $29.63.

You Bet Your Live book cover

You Bet Your Life:  From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation  

Paul A. Offit. Basic Books, 2021. 258 pages. $28.00.

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In Praise of Polytheism  

Maurizio Bettini. Translated from the Italian by Douglas Grant Heise. University of California Press, 2023. 164 pages. $24.95.

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Learning to Talk

Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt and Company, 2022. 157 pages. $19.99.

David Smith cover image

David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor

Michael Brenson. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2022. 842 pages. $50.00.

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The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen:  Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World 

Linda Colley. Liveright, 2022. 512 pages. $35.00.

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Looking for the Good War:  American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness 

Elizabeth D. Samet. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021. 368 pages. $28.00.

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What Lightning Spoke: New & Selected Poems 

Robert Bensen. Bright Hill Press, 2022. 292 pages. $18.95.