Sherbert Illuminated

  Most readers have a few favorite premises; for some people, pirate stories are inherently fascinating, for others, multi-generational family sagas are the best. For me, the narratives of soldiers who belong to a minority group fighting in a larger conflict are very interesting. Books like Tu by Patricia Grace and The World’s War by David Olusoga litter my TBR, and others like Tom Reiss’ The Black Count , have earned high ratings from me. So Forgotten 遗忘 , a play by about the Chinese Labor Corps in the First World War, sounded absolutely wonderful. But could it ever live up to its premise? It did its best. British East Asian playwright Daniel York Loh keeps the narrative focus comparatively small, following a trio of friends from a small village in 1917 Shandong Province who, at the suggestion of their headman, enlist as laborers for the British Army. Old Six, Big Dog and Eunuch Lin, aided by Old Six’s wife and a literate man known only as “The Professor,”  endure the chaos of the E

This book is a wonderful gift from my mother’s friend, Professor Demleiter. Thank you again for your generosity! Over the long, pleasant winter vacation, I felt my mind beginning to atrophy. The absence of deadlines and grades didn’t remove the desire to learn entirely, but my inclination to study subjects that I didn’t love—everything but English, German and history—had dramatically decreased. With the new year (and my high school midterms) fast approaching, I elected to review two subjects at once and picked up Wissen für Kinder: die Erde , a German-language children’s book of scientific information about the Earth. Wissen für Kinder is divided into different subjects like “Atmosphere and Weather,” or “Countries and People.” and arranged in a question-and-answer format. Examples of questions “How old is our drinking water?” “Could dinosaurs live in the arctic?” and “What are Petrochemicals?” The answers usually take up a short paragraph and are easy to understand. As someone who is

  This is a very good book and I don’t recommend it. The average reader is unlikely to pick up The Light of Truth because most people don’t find accounts of lynching, massacres and other racial violence particularly amusing. But such is the journalism of Ida B. Wells, anti-lynching crusader of the late 19th- and early 20th century. People interested in this collection of her writings should be aware that The Light of Truth ’s contents tend toward the gruesome. Nevertheless, they are fascinating insights into American history between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Migration. During that time, millions of “Afro-Americans”—Wells’ preferred term—in the newly-liberated American South lived under the threat of violence from their white neighbors. In 1892 alone, 241 people, mostly black men, were hung, shot, or burned alive by extra-legal mobs. Southern authorities tended to ignore or condone these crimes because they belived lynching was an appropriate response to s

First and foremost, I would like to thank my German teacher for gifting me this book! I’m really grateful for your kindness and mentorship, and I look forward to discussing the story in-depth with you! Long before I began to review books, I had heard stories of Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, the two main characters of Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Measuring the World . I first became aware of the naturalist first at a German-immersion summer camp, where counselors portraying him and his partner Aimé Bonpland described the different parts of a tree to a crowd of curious English-speakers. The mathematician, meanwhile, was a recurring figure in the anecdotes of my father, whose dissertation determined the invertibility of Gauss maps and whose valiant efforts helped me survive the Wisconsin public school math curriculum. As my Algebra 2 teacher introduced the concept of summation, a classmate and I compared different versions of the Gauss Anecdote behind our school-issued chrom

This is the first time I’m reviewing a collection, so I’m not entirely sure where to start. The book Russian Plays is a compendium of four adaptations of classic Russian literature. Playwright Richard Crane partnered with director Faynia Willaims to stage them, beginning with Satan's Ball in 1977 and ending with The Brothers Karamazov in 1981. Each play is very different, and so are my opinions of them, so it’s probably best to explain a little about each play individually. The adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov demonstrates Crane at the height of his powers. His play condenses the dozens of characters from Dostoyevsky’s original novel into four actors—including a young Alan Rickman as Ivan in the 1981 production—who take turns embodying their buffoonish father and other side characters. The use of doubling emphasizes the story’s psychological themes and beautifully twists the relationship between the four brothers, who profess very different philosophies

  “‘And there’s no devil either?’ the sick man suddenly inquired merrily of Ivan Nikolaevich, ‘No devil…’ ‘Well now that is positively interesting!’ the professor said, shaking with laughter. ‘What is it with you—no matter what one asks for, there isn’t any!” (41) The Master and Margarita is a wonderful book, thanks to the efforts of five storytellers. Bulgakov is only the first. He’s probably the most important, too. The 20th-century Russian author has a wicked talent for atmosphere; his 1937 novel transports the reader to a Moscow that almost existed. The tense, wild summers of the Stalin-era city propel the story like hot air filling up a balloon. From high up in its basket, the reader is free to behold a thousand tragedies, which, at such a distance, become comedies. Jerusalem appears on the horizon for a few moments, then a moonlit world beyond time and space. Naked witches glide past on brooms. Smoke fills the air. It is a fantastic voyage, but escaping the terror that grips the

“We have failed to fully appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty. Not everyone living in a distressed neighborhood is associated with gang members, parole officers, employers, social workers or pastors. But nearly all of them have a landlord.” (5) Evicted by Matthew Desmond challenged my biases. Not my biases about poverty; it pretty much confirmed my perspective there. Landlords buy properties, neglect them and take advantage of racialized poverty to fatten their own pockets. Poor women, especially single mothers, face a nigh-impossible struggle to build a stable home. Neighborhoods and the availability of housing can improve or destabilize a person’s life. I believed these things before reading Evicted and Desmond’s extensive footnotes didn’t contradict them. The bias that Evicted overturned was a subtle parasite that I didn’t know had made a home in my system: the bias against sociologists. As the child of an urban historian (one who studies Milwauk