Julia M. Klein, the Forward’s contributing book critic, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her @JuliaMKlein.
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture George Gershwin’s Mercilessly Short Summertime
Summertime: George Gershwin’s Life in Music By Richard Crawford W.W. Norton & Company, $39.95, 592 pages It’s hard to read a biography of George Gershwin, who died at 38, without feeling a sense of loss. But rather than bemoan the composer’s premature passing, Richard Crawford, a musicologist and professor emeritus at the University of Michigan,…
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Culture In A Forged Van Gogh, A Real Story Of Lives Uprooted By Nazis
In the Full Light of the Sun By Clare Clark Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 424 pages, $27 “Fiction, unlike the truth, cannot defy belief,” Clare Clark writes in an author’s note appended to her latest novel. That hardly unassailable dictum defines her buffet approach to mining history. “In the Full Light of the Sun” is loosely…
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Culture How The War Against Sexual Harassment Was Won
Reckoning: The Epic Battle Against Sexual Abuse and Harassment By Linda Hirshman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 316 pages, $27 It’s hard to write history while it’s happening. One pitfall is the problem of assessing just how powerful a movement or trend really is. To wit: Is the current #MeToo furor the harbinger of a social revolution?…
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Culture His Father, The Communist
A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father By David Maraniss Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $28 As a biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss has trained his eye on U.S. presidents (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) and sports icons (Roberto Clemente and Vince Lombardi). In “A Good American Family,” he burrows…
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Culture They Were German. They Defied Hitler. But What Did They Accomplish?
Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule By Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis Dutton, 542 pages, $30 The most famous episode of German resistance to the Nazis is Operation Valkyrie, the unsuccessful July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler and install a constitutional government to negotiate the end of the war. That joint civilian-military…
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Culture Can ‘Tootsie’ Turn Men Into Mensches In The #MeToo Era?
After winning Tony and Grammy awards for his score for “The Band’s Visit,” composer-lyricist David Yazbek is poised for another Broadway hit with the musical adaptation of Sydney Pollack’s 1982 film classic, “Tootsie.” With book writer Robert Horn and director Scott Ellis, Yazbek (“The Full Monty,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “Women on the Verge of a…
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Culture Judaism In The Digital Age, By Way Of Nathan Englander
kaddish.com By Nathan Englander Alfred A. Knopf, 224 pages, $24.95 Religious rituals can seem cumbersome or constricting. It helps to believe that they matter — that they are, in fact, essential to righteousness or redemption. The possibilities of the digital world, by contrast, can seem liberating — a promise of entertainment, distraction, ease and convenience….
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Culture A Wandering Jew Finds Her Way Back Home
The Art of Leaving By Ayelet Tsabari Random House, 336 pages, $26 As a young woman, Ayelet Tsabari is the prototypical wandering Jew. She abandons her family, in suburban Tel Aviv, for the United States, Canada, India, Thailand and other countries, fleeing grief and loss. But is she losing even more in the process? Bouncing…
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