Of Housing and Homes

Brave New Home: Our Future in Smarter, Simpler, Happier Housing Diana Lind Bold Type Books, 2020; 272 pages, $16.99   Perhaps the most famous quote about the concept of home hails from Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man”: “Home,” says one character to another, “is the place where, when you have to go […]

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Navigation Out of Trans Nation

Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness Miriam Grossman, MD Skyhorse Publishing, 2023; 360 pages, $32.50   Dr. Miram Grossman has long been a warrior on the frontlines of the culture wars surrounding sexuality and gender identity. As the proverbial battle-hardened general—having witnessed firsthand the lying dead, the maimed and […]

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Feminist Economics

Feminism Against Progress Mary Harrington Regnery, 2023; 256 pages, $29.99   Why did it take so long for feminism to happen? Feminists have no Archimedes or Newton, spurred to insight by bathwater or apples. Feminist thought was not translated into consciousness by a discovery like the Rosetta stone, or inaugurated by an explosively brilliant philosopher. […]

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O World, What Else Have You Got?

Redefining Rich: Achieving True Wealth with Small Business, Side Hustles, and Smart Living Shannon Hayes Ben Bella, 2021; 224 pages, $14.95   If you’d kindly turn to the index of first lines in the poetry anthology nearest you, you’ll find the O section led by two odes to the world: “O world, I cannot hold […]

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Durable Trades, Durable Families

The 1920 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Norwegian author Knut Hamsun for his novel Growth of the Soil. It is the story of Isak, who builds a farm and a life for himself out of a tract of wilderness and little else. Isak is one durable tradesman. He makes his beginning as a shepherd and then spends a few pages meandering through farming, gardening, woodworking, and carpentry…

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A Critique of Western Education

The Western model of schooling has few greater foes than Joel Spring. An emeritus professor at both Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Spring defines this model as the con¬ventional K-12 “educational ladder that students climb” from primary school to graduation from high school. This approach, he says, has swept around the globe, leaving in its wake…

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The Burden of the Bondwoman

Broken Bonds Jennifer Lahl, Melinda Tankard Reist, and Renate Klein (eds.) Spinifex, 2019; 140 pages, $24.95 Charlie Sheen gained fame as an actor, but notoriety as a john. When a judge asked him why a man of his status would have any need for commercial coitus, Sheen is reported to have explained that he wasn’t […]

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Identity Crisis

Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics Mary Eberstadt Templeton Press, 2019; 192 pages, $24.95 It is commonplace, though surely justified, to lament the extreme polarization of public life. With the launching of impeachment proceedings during an election year, those divisions seem unlikely to dissipate soon. Related and in some cases underlying this […]

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