It's a very simple idea: a woman receives a notebook with newspaper clippings from the Bintel Brief, a long-running letter column in turn of the century Yiddish newspaper The Forward. When she opens this notebook, the ghost of Abraham Cahan springs to life and they read the columns as they interact in the present. This is the charming premise of Liana Finck's graphic novel A…
Read moreImagine coming to terms with your life and realizing that you are boring and everything bad that has ever happened to you was of your own doing. This is what happens to Liam Pennywell in the Anne Tyler book Noah's Compass. After suffering a head injury, Liam becomes obsessed with gaining back his lost memories of the night of the accident. He has plenty of…
Read moreOn Such a Full Sea is about a future America where society is strictly organized by class, and long abandoned urban areas have become labor colonies. Descendants of those brought over years ago from ruined provincial China make up the labor class. They work to provide perfect produce and fish to the exclusive villages that surround the labor settlement. When the man she loves vanishes,…
Read moreSince its founding in 1948, Israel has been at the center of the crisis in the Middle East. Discussing the country's longstanding troubles is difficult and often fraught with emotion. Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel is a book that is stirring up emotions on all sides of the issue. In it, Blumenthal provides a history and analysis of Israeli policies toward…
Read moreLouise Blanchard Bethune (July 21, 1856 - December 18, 1913) was the first woman known to have worked as a professional architect in the United States. Born Jennie Louise Blanchard in Waterloo, New York, she had two educated parents (her father was a school principal; her mother a teacher) and as was common at the time, was herself educated at home. Her parents eventually moved…
Read moreNumerous paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe hang at the Milwaukee Art Museum which is not surprising as they are to be found in museums all around the world. Wisconsin, though, is her birthplace. Georgia O'Keeffe was born on a wheat farm just outside of Sun Prairie. She attended Town Hall School in Sun Prairie and by the age of ten was declaiming herself to be an…
Read moreAmerican fashion designer Ruth Harkness (1900-1947) stunned the world when she brought a live baby panda to the United States in 1936. Harkness, considered a party girl, accomplished something other experienced explorers and hunters tried and failed to do for almost one hundred years. Born in 1900 and raised in Philadelphia by a family that struggled to make ends meet, Ruth tried a variety of…
Read moreEva Hesse (January 11th, 1936 to May 29th, 1970) was a German-born American sculptor who is recognized for her pioneering work with non-traditional materials including latex, fiberglass, and plastics. Born a Jew in Nazi Germany, Hesse's family fled to the United States where Eva studied art at the School of Industrial Art, the Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and lastly, the Yale School of Art…
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