Joan Baum is a recovering academic from the City University of New York, who spent 25 years teaching literature and writing. She has a long career as a critic and reviewer, covering all areas of cultural history but particularly enjoys books at the nexus of the humanities and the sciences. With an eye on reviewing fiction and nonfiction that has regional resonance for Connecticut or Long Island, Joan considers the timeliness and significance of recently published work: what these books have to say to a broad group of readers today and how they say it in a distinctive or unique manner, taking into account style and structure as well as subject matter.
What could seem further from our polarized, diverse world and abbreviated social-media discourse than Virginia Woolf’s 1925 stream-of-consciousness no...
101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya should be required reading for all Peace Corps volunteers and administrators once the 60...
Nemesis by Philip Roth, published in 2010, eight years before he died, has got to be one of the most subtly instructive elegiac novels written about a...
It’s not every day that a 95-year-old-man comes out with an engaging memoir that looks back 80 years to trace the start of a successful theatrical car...
Prize-winning fiction writer, journalist, and witty, celebrated British bad boy of novels and cultural criticism Martin Amis, 71 now, and a resident o...
Here are two books that offer unique voices on surviving Nazi occupied Europe and have several key plot points in common. Both feature women as the ma...
Seventy-one-year-old Lucinda Watson, the granddaughter of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. and the fourth child of six of Thomas J. Watson, Jr. who r...
The screenwriter who penned "Psycho" is quoted as saying that when we watch or read scary stuff we don’t think about the real things that are frighten...
What literary text could seem further from reality these days than Beowulf — that approximately 1,500-year-old Anglo Saxon verse epic about a Scandina...
It’s always challenging to write about a group of short stories: What to mention? In Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s new collection called Truthtelling, “Pick...