Category Archives: Book Bench

Not sure if this line from the “Rawhide Down” review was intended to be funny, but I enjoyed it: The attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan is a harrowing story, more so than it seemed at the time. Tweet

In the July 18, 1988, issue of The New Yorker, Adam Schwartz published “The Grammar of Love,” a short story based on his teaching experiences in Chicago. He followed with the publication of “This Bed” in the June 22, 1992, issue, and earlier this year, both stories were incorporated into the novel “A Stranger on […]

For most of my adult life, I’ve been afraid of apes, the result of an effective—too effective—intro-level anthropology class that outlined the ways in which humans and primates are just a few DNA twists away from being identical. Kate, in her post last week, asked, “Who wants to hate a chimp?” Me. I did. Chimps […]

In 1986, Craig A. Monson—now a professor of music at Washington University in St. Louis—took a few days off from his research in Italy, and visited a little-known museum in Florence. There he found a Renaissance music manuscript that he traced to a Bolognese convent—surprising, given the raunchy lyrics of its secular selections: “One day […]

This week, it’s “The Intimates,” by Ralph Sassone, that’s getting added to my list: Sassone has a keen understanding of the professional indignities and romantic frustrations of the young and well educated, but the novel feels like the prologue to a story that hasn’t been written yet. Tweet

My grandmother’s family came from, as she put it, “hearty German peasant stock,” a phrase invoked whenever my mom or her siblings complained about chores or homework. It was Grandma’s way of saying, “Suck it up, kid.” She was clever that way. Grandpa’s family was from Poznań, Poland, and as far as my childhood self […]

In 2006, Jessie Sholl’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. But before Sholl could deal with the illness, she had to first confront a sickness of a different sort: her mother’s compulsive hoarding, which rendered everything—her home, her car, and her life—completely unmanageable. In her memoir “Dirty Secret,” Sholl documents a disease that affects millions of […]