Dec 03 2025
subtitled A Story of the Louvre Museum and Architect I.M. Pei. I had no idea that the glass pyramid of the Louvre was only built in 1989! For some reason, I thought it was far more modern, tho perhaps I just wasn’t paying much attention at the time. After all, I’d visited the Louvre a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/03/the-glass-pyramid-by-jeanne-walker-harvey-khoa-le/
Nov 19 2025
subtitled The True Story of an Imaginary Woman and the Real People She Helped. Hand to God, I did not know that the Dorothy of this saying wasn’t a real person! I always assumed it was an allusion to Dorothy Gale, the heroine of The Wizard Of Oz so iconically portrayed by Judy Garland in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/11/19/are-you-a-friend-of-dorothy-by-kyle-lukoff-levi-hastings/
Oct 27 2025
What I would give to have been as confident a teenager as Taylor Cassidy! As this book progresses, it becomes clear that good parenting played a huge role in raising such a well-adjusted, intellectually curious, boundlessly creative person who, in turn, wants to shine a bright, warm light for others to follow and be inspired …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/27/black-history-is-your-history-by-taylor-cassidy/
Oct 06 2025
Yes, it is absolutely ludicrous to have a vigilante whose main weapon is a bowling ball, but he’s out there fighting neo-Nazis and we 100% need more of that nowadays! And it isn’t just some cut-and-dried good guy vs generic white nationalists story either. There’s a lot of nuance in this book, as well as …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/06/the-holy-roller-volume-one-by-andy-samberg-rick-remender-joe-trohman-roland-boschi-moreno-dinisio/
Mar 02 2025
Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/02/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
Feb 26 2025
with illustrations by Johnalynn Holland and an afterword by Tiffany Momon. As Black History Month draws to a close, I decided to leapfrog past the other books in my schedule to make sure that I could provide coverage for this important title while the month is still ongoing. And this is a very important title, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/26/a-short-history-of-black-craft-in-ten-objects-by-robell-awake/
Feb 12 2025
featuring the art of Tracy Chahwan, Ganzeer, Ghadi Ghosn, Omar Khouri, Sirene Moukheiber, Hicham Rahma and Enas Satir. Hoo boy, readers, what a book. If you’re as unfamiliar with current events in the Middle East and North Africa as I am, then this book is likely to be a jarring experience for you, as Yazan …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/12/lebanon-is-burning-and-other-dispatches-by-yazan-al-saadi-et-al/
Dec 27 2024
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/27/wrapping-up-4/
Nov 25 2024
subtitled How Lorraine Hansberry Found Her Voice Oh, y’all, I don’t even know why I’m crying. No, actually, I suspect I do: I am shamed, and for once not in a bad way, and challenged by the courage it took for playwright Lorraine Hansberry to follow her dreams and live honestly in an era potentially …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/25/what-i-must-tell-the-world-by-jay-leslie-loveis-wise/
Nov 17 2024
Any book about current events eventually becomes a book about history, and a bit of a historical object itself. If it’s a good one, its insights will transcend the immediate period of its writing, illuminating its subject over a longer period, showing readers how the long term looked at a particular time. Michael Thumann’s Das …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/17/das-lied-von-der-russischen-erde-by-michael-thumann/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire