When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once

I was supposed to have gone on a trip to Israel earlier this month. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my plans owing to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East. One thing I had been especially looking forward to was a visit to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv to see 20 & 20: A Lens of Her Own , an exhibition about trailblazing Jewish women photographers and their contemporary successors. Maybe I'll still get to see it before it closes, but until then