By Christopher Hartman for Upstate Diary, October 6, 2019 During the 1980s, Serrano created large-scale, color photographs that were heavily influenced by Christ’s Passion; his youth in a Cuban-American, Roman Catholic home, and his love for the…

Review by Christopher Hartman in Pangyrus, July 30, 2019 Dimitris Lyacos: Poena Damni: I: Z213: Exit; II: With the People from the Bridge; III: The First Death Translated from the original Greek by Shorsha Sullivan Follow the news these days, or…

Review by Christopher Hartman in Pangyrus, March 16, 2019 Paul Laurence Dunbar, Beyond the Mask, written and directed by Frederick Lewis He sang of love when earth was young, /And love itself was in its laze, /But ah the world had turned to praise,…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, November 30, 2017 We are at a new racial flashpoint in America. From the protests over the shooting of unarmed black men and boys, to the apparent an increase in the number of white…

Review by Christopher Hartman in Pangyrus, September 7, 2017 Injun, by Jordan Abel. Talonbooks, Vancouver, B.C., Canada. $16.95 (Canada/U.S.) The atrocities inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the Americas through the centuries are…

We each create our own worlds. And when introduced to one as fascinating as Kathy Ruttenberg's, there's an overwhelming sense that you've left reality behind and taken a trip through the looking glass

Review by Christopher Hartman in Upstate Diary, July 22, 2017 "Hello folks. Today we're heading into the 88th consecutive day of no rain in North Georgia in this, the hottest September on record, and there's no end in sight." There's a drought in…

Review by Christopher Hartman for Upstate Diary, September 30, 2016 With her latest book 'Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction', Tama Janowitz ultimately proves, with humor, exasperation, tears, and a vibrant spectrum of other emotions, that…

Review by Christopher Hartman in Pangyrus, September 26, 2016 In much of her fiction, Dana Spiotta has focused on relationships among friends and family, with their frustrations, recriminations and nearly incurable optimisms. In her current novel,…

Review by Christopher Hartman in Pangyrus, May 14, 2016 William Gass is a master of the English language. His prose is smooth and muscular: at once honey dripping off a hot tin roof, and a hammer encased in velvet. His greatest achievement in Eyes:…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, August 13, 2015 In his 1978 biography of James Baldwin, Louis H. Pratt called the eminent 20th-century African-American writer a man "concerned with the destruction of the fantasies…

Review by Christopher Hartman for the Christian Science Monitor, February 23, 2015 Carrie Gibson’s thoughtful and extensively researched Empire’s Crossroads is a revelation. It is both a readable and in-depth study of the machinations of empire…

In the annals of modern colonialism and hegemony, few phenomena are as intriguing as China’s aggressive movement into Africa, where, according to Howard W. French in China’s Second Continent, approximately one million Chinese have now migrated. In…

Review by Christopher Hartman for the Christian Science Monitor, June 4, 2014 David Van Reybrouck’s magnificent Congo: The Epic History of a People, as translated from the Dutch by the award-winning Sam Garrett, is truly an “epic” work. It spans the…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2013 In the introduction to his wonderful new biography Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, Christoph Irmscher carefully lists some of the more “undelightful” aspects…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 2012 Georges Doriot, the eminent Harvard Business School professor and widely acknowledged “father of venture capital,” had an annual ritual: He would have his students…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, April 27, 2012 George Santayana, the eminent Harvard philosophy professor, novelist, and poet is widely known for his prescient observation: “Those who do not remember the past are…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2012 William H. Gass’s Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts is a remarkable work of criticism on several levels. Gass, who is the author of both fiction and…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, December 28, 2011 If there were one word to encapsulate the life of George Frost Kennan, it would be “conflicted.” Starting with his youth in Milwaukee in the first decades of the 20th…

Review by Christopher Hartman in the Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 2008 In the 139 years of its existence, Goldman Sachs has endured the Great Depression, the collapse of the high-tech hedge fund called Long Term Capital Management in the…