Books

Mary Norris’s new book, “Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen,” takes readers on a personal voyage across the wine-dark seas of Greek history, mythology, geography and especially etymology, a word that derives from the Greek ἐτυµολογία (etumología), itself from ἔτυµον (étumon), meaning “true sense,” and the suffix -logia, denoting “the study of.”

Women and art have always had a bad relationship. No, let’s rephrase that. Art, as pulled from sewage of common life, singled out from history’s clutter, buffed, shined and hung for all to see as exemplary, yes, that kind of art, has rarely considered the work of women. As a 1989 screen print by the anonymous female artist collective Guerrilla Girls famously stated of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Less than 5% of artists in the Modern Arts Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.”

We are conscious of living in a time of bitter factionalism and stark polarization, but there is possibly some comfort in knowing that the country has seen worse. Jack Kelly’s “The Edge of Anarchy” (Saint Martin’s Press, 2018) takes us back to the 1890s, the so-called Gilded Age, a time of great income disparity and economic turbulence that produced social upheavals on a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes.

In the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election, candidate Donald J. Trump, a reality television star on his third marriage, was quoted saying that if Ivanka was not his daughter he’d like to date her, a tape was released of him bragging to a TV journalist about how women let him grab them “by the pussy,” and he claimed that the Bible was his favorite book but he was unable to quote a single verse from it.  
In 2016, 80 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump.