Anne Trubek, Associate Professor at Oberlin College, has written reviews for Mother Jones, Paste, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, the city with the best libraries in the nation.
Submitted by Anne Trubek on Wed, 01/27/2010 - 2:49pm 
"Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock" by Henry Adams
I always head straight to the American art section whenever I visit an art museum, and often I have the rooms to myself. I take an outsider’s pride in my enthusiasm for pre-1940s American art, since the art historical establishment has long discounted it. I especially love Thomas Hart Benton’s paintings, so full of hunger, color, movement and quirky left-wing patriotism. I even hung a poster of one of his paintings in my son’s nursery.
But those supposedly in the know, the art critics, scoff at Benton, deeming him a naïve realist, a patronizing racist or a Midwestern yahoo.
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Submitted by Anne Trubek on Wed, 12/16/2009 - 11:08am 
"Don't Follow Me, I'm Lost" by Richard Rushfield
Hampshire College was founded in 1970 as the ne plus ultra progressive institution. The elite liberal arts college in Massachusetts has not grades, no distribution requirements, flexible independent majors and, according to lore, lots of drugs and Frisbee.
What was it like to go to Hampshire in its early days, in the conservative eighties, or today? Have the ideals held up in an increasingly standards-driven educational landscape? What do Hampshire graduates go on to achieve, and how do they look back upon their unusually, though elite, education? Has this experiment worked?
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Submitted by Anne Trubek on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 12:04pm 
"The Late Age of Print" by Ted Striphas
The economic downturn has inspired an upswing in writing about the books as consumer objects: they are, depending upon the author, dead, dying, sure to survive or about to be digitally resurrected. Into this conversation comes Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control, available both in hard cover and as a Creative Commons e-book, carrying neither hysteria nor sentimentalism.
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Submitted by Anne Trubek on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 4:33pm 
"When Skateboards Will Be Free: Memoir of a Political Childhood" by Said Sayafiezadeh
I come to memoirs suspicious. As we know from reading exposes about James Frey's and J.T. Leroy's not-so-true true stories, the memoir can be tricky. Even if it remains faithful to the autobiographical record, it can suffer from other perils endemic to the genre, namely narcissism and bitterness. Memoirists often have a self-aggrandizing streak or a bone to pick.
So I picked up Said Sayrafiezadeh's When Skateboards Will Be Free: Memoir Of A Political Childhood with one eyebrow raised.
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