#book-review

#book-review

Patti Smith's latest book, A Book of Days, rests in your hand like a box of high-end chocolates  pleasingly weighty, promising elegance and class alongside a touch of the bittersweet.Somehow it's not surprising that, after a casual shot of the author herself, the first picture in Smith's collection is of her own palm, fingers at attention, as if waving hello.

Image Lezende jongen, by Frans Hals Molly Young is on leave for the next several months.In her absence, colleagues from the Book Review will pick up the recommendation torch and appear in your inbox every two Saturdays.Dear readers, I broke my wrist last week, at the ice rink.Playing hockey?one of my brothers asked when I texted a picture of my splint.

Image Lezende jongen, by Frans Hals Molly Young is on leave for the next several months.In her absence, colleagues from the Book Review will pick up the recommendation torch and appear in your inbox every two Saturdays.Dear readers, As a child, I always liked Valentine's Day.My mom would leave a valentine by our cereal bowls, and sometimes a little heart candy, too.

Rome, 1950: The diary begins innocently enough, with the name of its owner, Valeria Cossati, written in a neat script.Valeria is buying cigarettes for her husband when she is entranced by the stacks of gleaming black notebooks at the tobacco shop.She's not permitted to buy one there on Sundays, she's told, but the tobacconist gives her one anyway, which she stashes under her coat.

Naomi Ackie in "Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody."(Emily Aragones/Sony Pictures/AP) StarOutline StarOutline (1.5 stars) "Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody," director Kasi Lemmons's frustratingly one-note biopic about the pop songstress, who died in 2012 at age 48, suffers from an egregiously ironic musical sin: It's all hooks and no bridges.

As the season of holiday meal preparation approaches, here's an interesting thought experiment: Could you write a cookbook with your family?For most of us, the answer is a resounding no, for reasons involving logistics, talent and temperament.The Leung family is an exception.They not only have teamed up to produce a cookbook, The Woks of Life  a colorful, uncomplicated guide to preparing Chinese meals, inspired by their blog by the same name  but even have a best seller on their hands.

Chernobyl Prayer: A Book Review - Hannah Cowne, St Philomena's School (Image: Hannah Cowne) Recommended to me by a teacher, I found Chernobyl Prayer', by Svetlana Alexievich, to be an incredibly profound and insightful book.The book contains many monologues, or interviews, of different individuals who had some form of attachment to the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

Buried deep in a box in Taffy Brodesser-Akner's house is a script she wrote while studying screenwriting at New York University.Though she hasn't revisited the aging document in decades - "If I turned the page, it would crack," she jokes - Akner can still recall the particulars of her senior thesis.

BUTTS: A Backstory, by Heather Radke In the essay Dying to Be Competent in her 2019 collection, Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom recounts a harrowing medical crisis that began with a literal pain in her butt.She was 30 and four months pregnant when her ass started hurting, the right side, accompanied by copious bleeding.

Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan), left, and Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) are New York Times reporters investigating film producer Harvey Weinstein in "She Said," directed by Maria Schrader.(JoJo Whilden/Universal Pictures)(3.5 stars) The broad factual contours of the story related in "She Said" are well known: In 2017, New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor published an explosive series of articles about film producer Harvey Weinstein, raising credible allegations that he engaged in serial sexual abuse and assault of actresses and employees over decades.