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 and @juliamklein.bsky.social
Julia M. KleinContributing Book Critic
By Julia M. Klein
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Culture A Gorgeous Memoir of a Personal Hell
Nobody’s Son: A Memoir By Mark Slouka W.W. Norton & Company, 278 pages, $26.95 For the epigraph of his gorgeous, devastating memoir, Mark Slouka turns to the pre-eminent poet of hell, Dante: “Each one wraps himself in what burns him.” The quotation, it becomes clear, applies to Slouka, his mother and — above all —…
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Culture The Unlikely Story of Nachman Libeskind’s Survival
In the Unlikeliest of Places: How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags and Soviet Communism By Annette Libeskind Berkovits, foreword by Daniel Libeskind Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 296 pages, $34.99 The name Libeskind most likely conjures Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Jewish Museum Berlin and master planner of the World Trade Center site. “In the…
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Culture How The Sharps Defied the Nazis and Became American Heroes
Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War By Artemis Joukowsky III, foreword by Ken Burns Beacon Press, 272 pages, $25.95 Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War A film by Ken Burns and Artemis Joukowsky Premiering 9 p.m., September 20, on PBS In some respects, Waitstill and Martha Sharp resembled other Holocaust rescuers: They were motivated by…
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Culture America’s Cosmetic Titans Go Head-To-Head In ‘War Paint’
For decades, the two great 20th-century titans of cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, feuded, competing for beauty hegemony and celebrity, expressing mutual disdain, and purloining each other’s ideas and employees. At one point, Rubinstein even hired Arden’s ex-husband Tommy Lewis, both a charming philanderer and a gifted salesman. But what if, for all their…
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Culture How Helen Gurley Brown Turned Herself Into a Cultural Icon
Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown By Gerri Hirshey Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 528 pages, $27 She told one girlfriend that she had slept with 178 men before her marriage. Even afterward, she never stopped having discreet affairs, using another friend’s apartment for assignations. Raised in poverty and insecure…
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Culture The Time When Hitler Blinked
Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany By Nathan Stoltzfus Yale University Press, 432 pages, $40 In late February and early March 1943, “Aryan” spouses in mixed marriages, primarily women, gathered in Berlin’s Rosenstrasse to demand the release of their Jewish husbands from detention. After threatening to shoot the protesters, the Third Reich unexpectedly…
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Culture How Many Neighbors Were Complicit in the Holocaust?
Facing deportation to Auschwitz, 13-year-old Steven Fenves watched as neighbors in Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia lined the stairs, “waiting to ransack whatever we left behind, cursing at us, yelling at us, spitting at us as we left.” Choking up, he also recalled in an oral history that the family’s cook rushed into the apartment to salvage artwork…
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Culture For Diane Arbus, Photography Was Like Sexual Conquest
Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer By Arthur Lubow Ecco, 752 pages, $35 Arthur Lubow writes that he has tried to tell the story of the photographer Diane Arbus with “the detail and clarity that she prized.” The portrait that emerges in “Diane Arbus,” the first major biography since Patricia Bosworth’s in 1984 is of…
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