Details

Titel

Nonfiction Reviews

Ist Teil von

• Publishers Weekly, 2024, Vol.271 (18)

Ort / Verlag

New York: PWxyz, LLC

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Quelle

Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Encouraging organizations to “put a name and a face” on the individuals they help in communications with donors, Beer describes how a Catholic hospital system used uplifting patient stories when raising funds. Unfortunately, Beer often drifts off subject, as when he claims, without evidence, that declining marriage rates have increased disconnectedness and decries the alleged stinginess of “snotty” socialists. Historian Van Reybrouck (Congo) paints a rich portrait of a stratified pre-WWII colonial society in the Dutch East Indies, then recaps the upheavals that demolished Dutch authority: the Japanese occupation during WWII that destroyed the colonial administration while giving Indonesians experience in military resistance, the dramatic 1945 declaration of an independent republic, and the chaotic conflict that pitted young republican firebrands against Dutch and pro-Dutch Indonesian forces and later devolved into civil war among Islamist, communist, and nationalist Republican factions. While Eckstein’s ample facts occasionally strain for significance (the Whitney contains “New York City’s largest column-free exhibition spaces”), the book’s true strengths are its role as a kind of communal scrapbook, with piquant anecdotes relayed from others—like poet Sharon Messmer, who, recalling a break-up with a boyfriend at the Art Institute of Chicago, blames the museum’s proximity to bars—and Eckstein’s illustrations.