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 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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Culture In the Ghettos of Poland, Few Heroes and Many Witnesses
In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz Edited and with an introduction by Samuel D. Kassow; translated and co-edited by David Suchoff Yale University Press (New Yiddish Library), 309 pages, $35 The people perished, but the writings survived. Several of the East European Jewish ghettos forced into existence and…
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Culture They Hunted Nazis to the Ends of the Earth
The Nazi Hunters By Andrew Nagorski Simon & Schuster, 416 pages, $30 There is a Zelig-like quality to Andrew Nagorski’s “The Nazi Hunters.” More often than not, in a saga spanning decades and continents, Nagorski has been there, interviewing the men and women pursuing the worst villains of the Holocaust. Many of the stories he…
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Culture Chanan Tigay’s Mad Search for the World’s Oldest Bible
The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible By Chanan Tigay Ecco, 368 pages, $27.99 Before Bedouins discovered the first Dead Sea Scrolls, in 1947 in a cave near the Dead Sea, another ancient manuscript briefly enraptured the archaeological community and promised to transform biblical scholarship. The find in question was…
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Culture The Enduring Mysteries of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg: The Heroic Life and Mysterious Disappearance of the Man Who Saved Thousands of Hungarian Jews From the Holocaust By Ingrid Carlberg, with an introduction by Kofi Annan; translated by Ebba Segerberg MacLehose Press, 639 pages, $29.99 He was the multilingual scion of a powerful Swedish banking family, a gifted artist and architect, a…
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Culture Love in the Time of Viagra
Scary Old Sex: Stories By Arlene Heyman Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $26 In this era of energetically aging baby boomers and gauzy Viagra advertisements, discussing postmenopausal sex is not quite the taboo-shattering enterprise of yesteryear. But that fact doesn’t render Arlene Heyman’s debut short-story collection any less powerful or engaging. Heyman’s characters use sex to…
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Culture For Harry Houdini’s Wife, Love Was Not a Magic Trick
Mrs. Houdini By Victoria Kelly Atria Books, 320 pages, $26 The epigraph of this novel, a fictionalized account of the love story between the escape artist Harry Houdini and his wife, Bess, is a quotation from W.B. Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” The Irish…
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Culture Magical Realism and Sexuality Energize Holocaust Novel
Unspeakable Things By Kathleen Spivack Alfred A. Knopf, 290 pages, $25.95 Severed fingers tapping out a Schubert melody, violated flesh sizzling with sulfurous handprints, ghosts wrapping themselves around the living – these are among the images, unspeakable and clamorous, that populate Kathleen Spivack’s grotesquely poetic debut novel. Audaciously conceived and gorgeously written, “Unspeakable Things” is…
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