BOOK BARN

#280: SHAKESPEARE, OF AN AGE. William Shakespeare in the year 1606 wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. (The satiric songwriter Tom Lehrer once said “There are people who really make you realize how little you’ve accomplished.” And added: “By the time Mozart was my age he had been dead for four years.”) In his book A Year in the Life of Shakespeare 1599 James Shapiro did a canny job of connecting Shakespeare’s work for that year--Henry V, Julius Caesar, As

#279: WITH TOOTHBRUSH AND WITHOUT. Colm Tóibín’s book Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush is a fairly splendid example of how much you can convey in the short space of 125 pages, and how much those pages can tilt your image of an artist and their time. Lady Gregory, if she is only a name to you, was, with William Butler Yeats, one of the co-founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which did so much to expand and alter the culture of Ireland, and a prime mover of the Irish Renaissanc

#278: WELCOME TO OUR WORLD(S). In 2011, the essayist Naomi Klein had her first experience—a conversation overheard in a public rest room in New York—of having her identity scrambled with that of another writer, Naomi Wolf. It wasn’t just the coincidence of their shared first name: both had written extensively on social, political, and climate issues. What was particularly disconcerting to Klein was that Wolf had abandoned her original feminist and leftish stances for a hea