Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Upon the publication of a new anthology of Irish short stories (to be published in the U.S. in March), Keith Hopper surveys the history of such anthologies and the history of attempts to explain why the Irish thrive in the form. . . . Zadie Smith on some movie about Facebook and a book about technology — but really, Zadie Smith, brilliantly, on our impoverished lives. . . . Geoff Dyer reviews My Prizes, in which Thomas Bernhard writes about the awards he reluctantly received: “The pieces in My Prizes are nice anecdotes, with some wonderful riffs, but they don’t have the aesthetic shape or inner propulsion to amount to more than that.” . . . Vivian Gornick examines the marriage of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy: “Neither could have understood in advance of the marriage the depth of emotional ambition that motivated them, much less that it was precisely because that ambition was destined to be thwarted that each would be bound permanently, one to the other. It was the stuff upon which Sigmund Freud was to build an intellectual empire.” . . . Adam Bradley says Jay-Z’s first book may leave readers “dissatisfied with the level of revelation and reflection,” but it showcases the lyrics of rap in a refreshing way.

Monday, November 1st, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, in stores yet, but it is a monster, the thickest brick of a book that I’ve seen in some time. Maud Newton says it’s worth the possible back pain to pick it up: “[L]ike Roth’s and Vonnegut’s, Levin’s flights of fancy are placed in service of a deadly serious project. Not only is he, as he recently told The Chicago Tribune, having “a conversation with Jewish literature,” he’s illustrating, in a wholly original way, exactly what sort of catastrophe results when fervent religious conviction meets brute force.” . . . Tim Parks reviews Philip Roth’s latest, and really his last several books. About the latest, Nemesis he says, “so brazenly are we thrust towards this textbook enigma that readers may find themselves more intrigued by the author’s loyalty to tired literary stratagems than interested in the fate of characters who were never much more than pieces on a chessboard.” . . . Jed Perl on the New York stories of Elizabeth Hardwick: “Hardwick’s stories have the potency of metropolitan fairytales. It is the eloquence of certain images, characters, and actions that holds us, while the meanings or morals to be drawn from these adventures remain just beyond our reach.” . . . Steven Shapin reviews The Emperor of All Maladies, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s sprawling story of cancer, “a history of the disease and of the attempts to describe it, explain it, manage it, and cure it, or just to reconcile its victims to their fate.” . . . Philip Caputo reviews Bruce Machart’s “impressive” debut novel: “Machart has dared to park his wagon on the tracks of the Desert Limited and managed not to get flattened by [Cormac] McCarthy’s locomotive.” . . . Evelyn McDonnell says that Sara Marcus’ history of the Riot Grrrl movement “puts into printed narrative a much misunderstood and maligned but crucial piece of the feminist past.”

Monday, October 25th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Dwight Garner says that Avi Steinberg’s Running the Books, which recounts the author’s time as a prison librarian in Boston, “gets off to an obnoxious start,” reading mostly like a “hopped-up” gimmick. But according to Garner, the gimmick deepens into something much more: “Mr. Steinberg’s sentences start to pop out at you, at first because they’re funny and then because they’re acidly funny. The book slows down. It blossoms. Mr. Steinberg proves to be a keen observer, and a morally serious one. His memoir is wriggling and alive — as involving, and as layered, as a good coming-of-age novel.” . . . Maile Meloy makes Thomas McGuane’s latest sound like a lot of fun, even if it’s a bit sloppy in squaring all the facts of its fictional world: “As with McGuane’s earlier novels, the rambling plot is sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey.” . . . Patrick Marnham reviews Pedigree, the “lengthy but little-read autobiographical novel” by Georges Simenon, “a Dickensian portrait, with poverty, crime, lunacy, wealth, corruption, and mockery, but a complete absence of Dickensian sentimentality.” . . . Jay Parini has written novels about Tolstoy, Walter Benjamin, and now, Herman Melville. Christopher Benfey admits he dreaded reading this latest, but he comes away mostly impressed. . . . John Self considers a new edition of a 1950s novel in which UK and U.S. astronomers simultaneously discover the “existence of a black cloud in the outer regions of the solar system” that is moving toward Earth. “Gentlemanly panic, tempered by scientific curiosity, ensues.”

Monday, October 11th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Douglas Brinkley raves about Ron Chernow’s new biography of George Washington: “an epic, cradle-to-grave biography destined to win a slew of book awards. A Brooklyn native best known for his brilliant studies of Alexander Hamilton and John D. Rockefeller, Chernow displays a breadth of knowledge about Washington that is nothing short of phenomenal.” . . . Jill Lepore counters that enthusiasm, writing, “Chernow’s aim is to make of Washington something other than a ‘lifeless waxwork,’ an ‘impossibly stiff and wooden figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human.’ That has been the aim of every Washington biographer, and none of them have achieved it.” Lepore finds plenty of interest in Chernow’s book, but feels the final product suffers from applying modern-day context to Washington’s era: “Washington: A Life is a prodigious biography, expertly narrated and full of remarkable detail. But it is a psychological profile of a man who lived and died long before our psychological age, a romantic portrait of a man who was not a Romantic.” . . . Todd Gitlin says the Cold War may be over, but John le Carré’s ” flair for the gut-wrenching drama of betrayed honor” is strong as ever: “He is professionally interested in how hard it is to clean dirty hands, and his sympathies are always with those who make the effort, even if they are doomed.” . . . Amy Benfer reviews Myla Goldberg’s new novel, in which a grown woman reconsiders the role she may have had in the disappearance of a friend during childhood. . . . Allen Barra reviews Jane Leavy’s new biography of Mickey Mantle: “[Leavy] records Mantle’s sins and achievements with the diligence of a first-rate reporter, never losing sight of what drew her to Mickey as a fan in the first place.” . . . Stephen Hawking once left the door open for the existence of God. Peter Galison says Hawking’s latest argues that science doesn’t need God to complete its picture. . . . Russell Stannard’s new book, The End of Discovery, is meant, in part, as a response to books like Hawking’s. The Economist says a response is good idea, but that Stannard’s is “unsatisfactory . . . rushed and lumpy.”

Monday, August 16th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

David L. Ulin reviews two books by Albert Cossery that were recently translated into English. Ulin writes that Cossery, “who died in 2008 at age 94, ought to be a household name. He’s that good: an elegant stylist, an unrelenting ironist, his great subject the futility of ambition ‘in a world where everything is false.’ [. . .] If these books are any indication, someone should get the rest of his writing — there are seven other titles — back into print.” . . . A new biography of Edith Wharton is ostensibly aimed at young adults, but Katie Roiphe’s review makes it sound appropriate for older ages. It includes some great details: “Wharton embarked on her second novel at 14, in secret, and called it Fast and Loose. As soon as she completed it she fired off several reviews by fictional critics: ‘A twaddling romance’; ‘Every character is a failure, the plot a vacuum, the style spiritless, the dialogue vague, the sentiments weak and the whole thing a fiasco.’” . . . In a review that’s unsurprisingly moving around the web at the speed of sound, John McWhorter discusses a new book about the possible remedies for the worst problems in African-American communities. . . . Michael Dirda recommends the work of James Lees-Milne, “widely regarded as the most entertaining English diarist of the past century.” (continues after the jump)

Monday, August 9th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Francine Prose praises the genius of Hans Keilson as seen in two short novels, one of them translated into English for the first time: “Although the novels are quite different, both are set in Nazi-occupied Europe and display their author’s eye for perfectly illustrative yet wholly unexpected incident and detail, as well as his talent for storytelling and his extraordinarily subtle and penetrating understanding of human nature.” . . . Michelle Goldberg recommends a new book about the religious lives of nine people in India. (“No single volume could do justice to India’s lush religious diversity, but I have never read one that encompasses more of it, or that penetrates deeper, than William Dalrymple’s luminous new book. . . John Self reviews Tom McCarthy’s C, which will be published in the U.S. next month. (“It has everything that might appeal to certain literary prize juries: it’s stuffed with cannily-drawn characters, historical verisimilitude, and normally big subjects like war and death. Is that enough?”) . . . Tessa Hadley praises a debut novel just published in Britain, in which a disable young girl’s interior world makes up for her severely limited speech. Hadley writes that the book’s “conceit is ingenious, and it works.” . . . Paul Di Filippo reviews Mary Roach’s “often hilarious, yet journalistically and scientifically sound new book” about space travel, and compares its findings to the Mars-set science fiction of Joe Haldeman.

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Diane Johnson reviews five recent books about trends in marriage and the ways women think about it. (“The relentless use of ‘I’ suggests that what may have been lost in the solipsism of recent American culture is an elementary sense of others, male or female. But it’s also possible that this is merely a correction, and that a touch of egotism and sense of entitlement, too lacking in poor, plain Jane Eyre, represents a healthy rebalance, egotism to be apportioned equally between the two sexes.”) . . . Rebecca Newberger Goldstein writes about the soon-to-be-reissued The Brothers Ashkenazi, a novel by Israel Joshua Singer, the older brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Goldstein says, “[The novel’s] ambition and its range were unprecedented in Yiddish literature.” It was first published in English in 1936, at which time it went to the top of the bestseller list. . . . Janis Lull reviews a collection of prefaces to Shakespeare’s plays. (“This is probably the last book about Shakespeare. Or rather, it’s the last book about ‘Shakespeare,’ as he used to be presented in Anglo-American criticism.”) . . . Maggie Gee strongly recommends The Old Spring by Richard Francis (which, it seems, is only available from the UK at the moment). Following one day in the life of a pub, “this is that rare and technically demanding thing, a novel of conversation, like Ivy Compton-Burnett’s.” Gee concludes: “This is a small classic – a slim book of deep but intimate ambition, a record of the beauty and strangeness of small lives on a small island, where there is more than one kind of profit and loss.” . . . Peter Lewis calls a new history of five immigrant families, who all lived in the same New York tenement, “illuminating, rangy, and wonderfully atmospheric.” . . . Honoria St. Cyr, in reviewing a new collection of scholarly essays about the Edwardian era, wonders how the remembrance of golden ages clashes with more complicated reality.

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Rick Moody’s kitschy latest is built around a 600-page sci-fi novel within a novel. Sam Sacks shakes his head: “If nothing else, The Four Fingers of Death provides further evidence for the inverse relationship between literary theory and literary quality. As a ‘project’—that’s what the author calls the book in his acknowledgments—it succeeds; as a novel, it’s harebrained and largely unreadable.” . . . Colm Toibin praises Wendy Moffat’s “well-written, intelligent, and perceptive” biography of E. M. Forster, which addresses the writer’s homosexuality. “She uses the sources for our knowledge of Forster’s sexuality, including letters and diaries, without reducing the mystery and sheer individuality of Forster, without making his sexuality explain everything.” . . . David Greenberg assesses a new biography of the 28th President of the United States: “Woodrow Wilson is too authoritative and independent to be reduced to the gadfly position of contrarianism: it is a judicious, penetrating measure of the man and his achievements and it should stand as the best full biography of Wilson for many years.” . . . Jessa Crispin reviews a new co-authored book about the prehistoric roots of human sexuality: “[Though the authors] claim they are not out to make the hunter-gatherer way of life sound more ‘noble,’ that is exactly what they do. Their anthropology sections are basically cut-and-paste jobs, and they leave out any of the dark stuff. Complex social and sexual systems are reduced to a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, making every society they mention sound like a sexy utopia.” . . . Matt Zoller Seitz examines the “psychological evolution” of George Carlin, as told in two recent books about the comic.

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Robert Faggen says that a new collection of correspondence between Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg is not to be missed: “The depth of their development as friends but especially as writers has never been shown more clearly than in this stunning new collection. The letters are sometimes long but almost infallibly interesting.” . . . Dennis Lehane says that Nic Pizzolatto’s new novel, Galveston, ranks with the best of the noir genre, partly because “[it] empathizes with its characters to a degree I’m hard pressed to recall in another recent novel.” . . . Laura Miller reviews Geoffrey O’Brien’s latest, a true-crime story about an esteemed New York family undone by an 1873 murder. Miller calls it “part Victorian family saga, part creepy gothic, full of haunted people drifting through rooms filled with dark, oversize furniture as immobile and dominating as the past they can neither revive nor escape.” . . . Wendy Smith says that in her new novel, Allegra Goodman “has rediscovered her sense of humor.” The book is set during the dotcom bubble, and in it, Goodman “works on a larger social canvas than ever before, armed with an awareness that to comprehend all the scheming and the sorrow, wit is indispensable.” . . . Jackie Wullschlager on four books about photographers and the role they play in defining the art form’s history. . . . James Meek writes about the relationship between Leo and Sofia Tolstoy.

Monday, June 21st, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Jed Perl writes about the deep roots of the circus’ appeal, and says that a new collection of Frederick W. Glasier’s circus photos from the first quarter of the 20th century is “one of the most beautiful art books of recent years.” . . . John Self enjoys a “witty, digressive” book about British roads. (“On Roads: A Hidden History is catnip for anyone, like me, who regrets that the Black Box Recorder song ‘The English Motorway System’ was actually a metaphor for a stagnant relationship and not just about the roads.”) . . . Ben Greenman’s latest collection takes the form of fictional letters between characters. Steve Almond says the stories are “as assured and persuasive” as any he’s read in a long time: “Greenman has the ear of a mimic, the mind of a philosopher and the timing of a stand-up comic.” . . . George Packer reviews Peter Beinart’s new book, in which Beinart looks back at a century of American history and regrets his own strong support for the Iraq War. (“The Icarus Syndrome finds the ground littered with Peter Beinarts, lying amid the remnants of large ideas and unearned confidence.”) . . . Roy Blount, Jr., takes issue with a book that celebrates the global triumph of the English language.

Monday, June 14th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Tom Bissell’s latest book, Extra Lives, details the author’s love affair with video games, and investigates whether or not the games can be considered art. Abigail Deutsch says, “Like a chat with a smart friend who may have fallen for a ditz, Extra Lives provides a lesson in articulate ambivalence.” And Jonathan Last says that Bissell is “so descriptively alert that his accounts of pixelated derring-do may well interest even those who are immune to the charm of video games.” . . . Off the top of my head, I can think of four or five recent books about noise and silence. Nicholas Carr reviews one of them, In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik: “Hearing loss, Prochnik reports, is becoming an epidemic, and yet, seeking refuge from noise in more noise, we continue to jack up the volume.” . . . Sylvia Brownrigg calls Ann Beattie’s new novella “a deceptively complex work, one that touches on the intricate strangenesses of friendship and marriage, and of life in that indulgent period [the 1980s].” . . . As a child, poet Paul Guest was in a bicycle accident that left him a quadriplegic. Christopher Beha reviews Guest’s new memoir, which includes an account of the accident “harrowing in its matter-of-factness.” . . . Peter Kramer reviews How Pleasure Works in the form of a conversation with the book’s author, Paul Bloom.

Monday, June 7th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Anthony Doerr says that Charlie Smith’s new novel, about lovers who “spiral through a demonic and cataclysmic romance that incinerates most everyone around them,” is “as blissed-out and excessive and aimless as its protagonist. It is both beautiful and disastrous. And its absolute apartness — in its gasping energy, in the ravishing excess of Charlie Smith’s prose — is something to be celebrated.” . . . Michael Agger says that Nicholas Carr’s latest, about the way the Internet is changing our brains, is “a Silent Spring for the literary mind.” And Daniel Menaker calls the same book “required reading for anyone who wants a cogent, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched statement of the techno-fears that, in however inchoate a way, many of us have harbored for going on a few decades now.” . . . Michael Kimmelman, a bit belatedly but intelligently, writes about two tennis books: Andre Agassi’s memoir and a history of the 1937 Davis Cup. . . . Paul Batchelor is impressed by Simon Armitage’s Seeing Stars, “a wildly inventive mix of satire, fantasy, comedy and horror,” saying that “there is more wit and adventure on display here than you’ll find in many poets’ careers.” . . . Laura Miller wonders why young readers are so interested in dystopian fiction.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources. It normally appears on Mondays.

At n+1, Alexander Provan writes a thorough critique of “lyrical essayist” John D’Agata’s new book, which frequently alters facts on a whim: “[D’Agata] seems to forget that the inability of language or representations to capture our experience of the world is a signal problem of art in the modern era, not just a characteristic of the essay—and that tackling this aporia does not in itself qualify something as art, nor make it interesting.” Plus this: “It is often difficult to shake the feeling that D’Agata is addressing those who have paid a large sum of money to have their creative personas validated.” Ouch. . . . In the new issue of Open Letter Monthly, Rohan Maitzen reads Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, and wonders if Austen remains a posthumous superstar because of “her representative standing as an icon for a nostalgically imagined past.” . . . Gary Lutz admires a short new book by Jane Unrue about the daughter of a washed-up actress: “With just over one hundred pages, some of them hosting no more than a wee phrase or the clarion burst of a sentence, and most of them giving out well shy of the bottom margins, the novel, though slender, is emotionally thorough, dense but not crammed, and unnoisily original in the bloodbeat and quiver of its prose.” . . . The Economist reviews a new social history of Iceland: “The story is not wholly pleasant. Even readers with strong stomachs will find them tested.” . . . Tim Rutten heaps praise upon Julie Orringer’s first novel, set against the Holocaust: “It’s hard to imagine a fictional setting more heavily strewn with literary and historical mines, but Orringer traverses this perilous rhetorical terrain with remarkable — and, more important, convincing, self-possession.” . . . Not sure when it’s being published in the U.S., but Jonathan Coe’s new novel is out in the UK, and Sean O’Brien has a funny image for it: “Jonathan Coe, acclaimed and admired, seems to have unwritten his novel in the act of writing it, plunging into a canyon like Wile. E. Coyote when he discovers that his tightrope only has one end secured.”

Monday, May 24th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Molly Worthen reviews a new study that takes the idea of America as a one-time “peaceful and God-fearing arcadia” and shreds it: “[This] masterful and rewarding book covers three and a half centuries of values, needs, ambitions, and feelings, and debunks a host of common misconceptions about American history.” . . . Gary Giddins is best known for his work about jazz, but a new collection of his writing on movies is “witty, informed and insightful.” . . . In an entertaining review, Lloyd Grove says that Sarah Ellison’s new book about Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal is “a definitive, indeed cinematic, account of the News Corporation’s conquest and occupation of this venerable business publication.” . . . Robert Gottlieb says, “There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there’s no such thing as a boring biography of them,” and that Charles Dickens is one of them. . . . Laura Miller has the “exhilarating, if also disorienting, sensation” of reading a new book about quantum theory: “Reading it is a bit like lifting the hood of your mind and moving the working parts around; it’s challenging and trippy — as only the Dr. Seuss realm of the quantum can be.” . . . Edward Luce is disappointed by Christopher Hitchens’ memoir: “Self-reflection is a key ingredient of autobiography, yet it is a quality in which Hitchens is sometimes wincingly deficient.”

Monday, May 17th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Damien G. Walter reviews China Miéville’s Kraken (forthcoming in the U.S.) for the Guardian. He says that Miéville “is far from the first novelist to threaten to obliterate London, he may win the prize for having the most fun along the way.” After summing up the plot, which involves a giant squid stolen from a musem, Walter writes: “If this sounds overblown, it is, and Miéville knows it: here we have a prodigious imagination letting rip. But alongside the exuberant displays of imaginative vigor, Kraken is Miéville both paying homage to and poking fun at urban fantasy. The genre that gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Dresden Files, Twilight and arguably even Harry Potter is systematically dissected and left quivering like the remains of a ritual sacrifice.” . . . Jacob Silverman says that, like viewers of The Hurt Locker, “[r]eaders of David Zimmerman’s debut novel, The Sandbox, may find themselves juggling similar concerns of believability and entertainment.” . . . Alexander Theroux reviews a new biography of Jack London that he judges “valuable” despite “endless speculation about London’s possible homosexuality.” . . . Brad Mackay reviews Wilson by Daniel Clowes, about “the latest in a string of disaffected male leads to originate from Clowes’ pen”: “Though a crackerjack writer, Clowes has never been a flashy cartoonist, preferring to focus on storytelling over innovative tinkering. But here [he] gets as ‘experimental’ as we’ve ever seen him, using gag comics – the one-pagers traditionally used as filler in kids’ comics – as a structural motif.”

Monday, May 10th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Dwight Garner reviews the first “proper full-dress biography” of a baseball great: “[Aaron’s] is a great American life, and Howard Bryant’s Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron rises confidently to meet it.” . . . Adam Phillips, always worth reading, considers Gary Greenberg’s book about depression and the ways we address it. . . . Michael Dirda calls Miguel Syjuco’s debut novel, Ilustrado, set in Manila and New York, “wildly entertaining . . . absolutely assured in its tone, literary sophistication and satirical humor.” . . . Mark Lilla reads five new books and analyzes the Tea Party moment (“Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century.”) . . . Film historian and critic David Thomson reviews a new book about the creation of DreamWorks. (“The problem is that the business has now become as boring as the pictures—and LaPorte is banging her head against this brutal fact.”) . . . The Economist recommends two new studies of E. M. Forster. . . . Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel, out in the U.S. later this year, is told from the perspective of Marilyn Monroe’s dog. John Banville calls the result “a subtle, funny and moving study of America on the eve of one of its periods of greatest crisis.”

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

David Plotz reviews Philip Pullman’s new novel, which reimagines Jesus as twin brothers with different aims: “Now, I applaud Pullman’s humanist beliefs as much as the next agnostic Jew, sympathize with much of his anti-clerical fury, and share his suspicion of organized religions. That said, The Good Man Jesus is often a drag. Weighed down with Christ’s leaden speeches, it is hectoring and obvious where His Dark Materials was subtle and joyful.” He then goes on to say Monty Python’s Life of Brian is a superior treatment of the same subject. . . . Tom Carson reviews a new history of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a dual portrait of Sitting Bull and General Custer, “the horse’s ass we rode in on.” . . . Laura Miller praises Michael Gruber’s new political thriller, The Good Son: “Adeptly plotted yet philosophical, worldly yet preoccupied with moral truth, it’s a book to provoke comparisons with John le Carré and Graham Greene, while at the same time eluding the ideological constraints that weigh so heavy on those masters.” . . . Michelle Goldberg reviews Elaine Tyler May’s new history of the pill, coinciding with its 50th anniversary: “The book covers a lot of ground very quickly; reading it is a bit like being a passenger on a bus tour glancing at the passing landmarks without time to explore any of them. It lacks the depth and richness of May’s superb 1995 history of childlessness in America, Barren in the Promised Land. Still, there are worse things one can say about a book than that it should be longer.” . . . Jincy Willett reviews a novel about “profoundly compartmentalized” people dealing with the aftermath of a suicide. . . . Michael J. Lewis says that a new book about Pop Art “will delight both the friends of Pop and its foes, for the book confirms the prejudices of each group.”

Monday, April 26th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A.C. Grayling reviews a new book that charts the philosophical and scientific study of wisdom: “Neuroscience is an exciting and fascinating endeavour which is teaching us a great deal about brains and the way some aspects of mind are instantiated in them, but by definition it cannot (and I don’t for a moment suppose that it claims to) teach us even most of what we would like to know about minds and mental life.” . . . Christine Rosen reviews a new book about one of yoga’s earliest promoters, and about the rise of the spiritual practice in America from the (sometimes criminal) fringe to mainstream smash: “[It’s] a story of scandal, financial shenanigans, bodily discipline, oversize egos and bizarre love triangles, with a few performing elephants thrown in for good measure.” . . . Ari Kelman reviews two books about extinction and biodiversity, and begins with an anecdote about Thomas Jefferson being unable to accept the idea that the mammoth was gone for good. (“His mind shackled by a venerable scientific theory known as the great chain of being—the notion that all life in God’s creation took the form of hierarchical links that could never be sundered—he refused to accept the reality of extinction.”) . . . Dan Falk reviews a book about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence written by Paul Davies, “the earthling most qualified to tackle the subject.” . . . Perhaps we should settle for some terrestrial intelligence: E. D. Hirsch, Jr., reviews Diane Ravitch’s new book about the American school system: “Written with verve, the book takes aim at imposing targets. It won’t be ignored.” (continues)

Monday, April 19th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

François Furstenberg says it’s “an opportune moment” for Leo Damrosch’s new book about Tocqueville’s tour of America: “At a time when generalizations about the American soul seem risky at best, it is somehow reassuring to learn that even the great Tocqueville was often winging it—and that some of his direst fears have not come to pass.” David S. Reynolds says, “While Damrosch’s book doesn’t come close to identifying real-life sources for all of Tocqueville’s arguments—no book of such concision could do that—it usefully connects specific themes to certain American locales.” . . . Michael Kazin says a new book about political violence in 19th-century America “takes a topic of undeniable historical significance and reduces it to a left-wing style of mush.” . . . This Wednesday marks the centenary of Mark Twain’s death. Several books have been published to more or less coincide with it. John Sutherland reviews five of them. . . . Jim Crace has said that All That Follows will be his penultimate novel. (I am sincere. But I might be fooling myself.”) Richard Eder says that, in it, Crace has created convincing people but has put them in a story “thinly and hastily contrived.” . . . Novelist Rupert Thomson’s latest tells the real-life story of the strange ways in which he and his two brothers dealt with the death of their father: “You might cynically wonder why Thomson should wish to tap into the lucrative memoir-market eight novels into his career; and there are points at which he lapses into the standard tropes of the genre. But for the most part it is written in the precise, wiry prose that brings hallucinatory intensity to his fiction.”

Monday, April 12th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Paula Byrne’s Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead examines the real-life relationships that inspired Brideshead Revisited. Michael Dirda calls it “altogether excellent and wickedly entertaining,” and concludes, “Over the years I’ve read all the major biographies of Evelyn Waugh, and Byrne’s is perhaps the narrowest in focus, concentrating on just the first 40 years of the writer’s life, but also the fastest moving and the most fun.” . . . . Ron Carlson praises Marisa Silver’s new collection of stories, Alone With You: “These stories stand out because of their high tolerance for complexity, never opting for a single note. The situations here don’t settle on the neat broad themes of loss or connection, but there are always surprises, nuances, changes of heart.” . . . Jennifer Senior says that Norris Church Mailer’s memoir “[adds] a fat new sheaf to the public dossier on her late husband, Norman Mailer, and tells an involving coming-of-age story to boot. The book will be of interest to anyone who works in a university marriage lab. It also shows that Norman wasn’t the only talented raconteur in the family.” . . . Jill Lepore reviews a “wonderfully insightful and judicious biography” of Henry Luce, the magazine-publishing giant, which is “more than the story of a life; it’s a political history of modernity.”\

Monday, April 5th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Lisa Miller’s Heaven tracks the historical development of the idea and reports on what current-day people imagine the afterlife will be. Johann Hari says the history is “highly competent (if rarely more)” but the reporting is “insufferable.” . . . The Economist looks at new books by Paul Johnson (Roman Catholic) and Philip Pullman (atheist), who, in very different ways, address the question: “Was Jesus of Nazareth divine or human, or did he combine both attributes in a unique, mysterious way?” . . . Jon Meacham reviews a new history of Christianity that reaches back to a thousand years before the birth of Christ. . . . In Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt makes an impassioned case for saving social democracy. Julian Baggini says that, “perhaps inevitably,” Judt is better at diagnosis than solutions: “In asking what is to be done, Judt suffers from an illusion common to intellectuals, that the way to get the world to walk right is to get it to talk right.” . . . Tom Bissell calls Jake Silverstein’s new book, the chapters of which alternate between fiction and nonfiction, “greatly entertaining and extremely funny.” He also calls it “one of the weirdest books I have ever read.”

Monday, March 29th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of notable reviews from other sources.

Liesl Schillinger reviews The Irresistible Henry House, a “thoughtful novel” about a young man who was raised at a time when “human babies were used as guinea pigs on American campuses, imported from orphanages to home economics programs to help college students hone their mothering skills.” . . . Douglas Brinkley calls David Remnick’s new book about Barack Obama “a brilliantly constructed, flawlessly written biography,” for which Remnick “interviewed a telephone book’s worth of notable figures in Obama’s life.” . . . Lincoln Caplan reviews The Death of American Virtue by Ken Gormley, a new book with the “ambition of capturing the sprawling Clinton-Starr saga in a historical narrative, which, despite the book’s reproving title, stops well short of reaching an overarching judgment. Given his book’s massive heft and notable attention to detail, [Gormley] has succeeded in his aims more comprehensively than anyone else to date.” . . . Ange Mlinko on the latest collection of poems by Graham Foust, whose work “bears some earmarks of country (and rock) lyrics: drinking, driving and longing.” . . . Daniel Mendelsohn considers “three recent novels that not only revisit Greek stories but, far more interestingly, do so in a Greek way, playing with the texts of the past in order to create, with varying degrees of success, a literature that is thoroughly of the present.” . . . Speaking of the Greeks, the naturalist E. O. Wilson’s first novel is partly modeled on the Iliad and includes a significant section that takes place inside an ant colony. Margaret Atwood weighs in.

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

A long version this week that continues after the jump. . . . Reviews of Ian McEwan’s latest have been mixed, but the most thorough I’ve seen so far is Thomas Jones’ in the London Review of Books. He says the book is genuinely funny, but that it also suffers from the “tyrannical predictability” of its plot. . . . Hilary Mantel reviews James Shapiro’s look at the controversies, ranging from highly unlikely to ludicrous, surrounding the authorship of Shakespeare’s work: “It’s a tale of snobbery and ignorance, of unhistorical assumptions, of myths about the writing life sometimes fuelled by bestselling authors who ought to know better.” . . . Second Pass contributor Alexander Nazaryan reviews a tour of Germany by Simon Winder. He’s not impressed: “Getting around Hitler is a nice thought, but it might be a bit late for that. Part history and part travelogue, Germania is too scattered to succeed as either. ‘Every attempt has been made to avoid a mere sequence of dreary dynastic events,’ Winder assures, but wrapping one’s mind around a nation that bequeathed to us both the Final Solution and Oktoberfest requires more than a breezy conversational style that, at its worst, comes off like a Wikipedia entry edited by a cantankerous Midlands comedian.” . . . The great Jill Lepore on a recent spate of books about settling for marriages, marriage troubles, and marriage counseling. (continues)

Monday, March 15th, 2010

The Beat (The Blog)

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Benjamin Schwarz was an outspoken fan of David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, the first book in a project called Tales of a New Jerusalem, which uses primary sources to tell the story of Britain from 1945 to 1979. Now, Schwarz reviews the second volume, Family Britain: “Kynaston has again written a masterpiece. More vividly and profoundly than any other historical work I’ve read, Tales of a New Jerusalem captures the rhythms and texture of everyday life and the collective experience of a nation. At once fine-grained and panoramic, witty and plangent, the books masterfully shift focus from deliberations in Whitehall to gossip in the back garden, from sweeping social changes to the hilarious but sad routine—the misguided attempts to please, the self-effacing apologies, the miscues—of a Cheshire family’s teatime.” He also spends a majority of the review writing about a new documentary film, Of Time and the City, which depicts Liverpool during the same time period. . . . Saul Austerlitz reviews a book about Vincente Minnelli, Mr. Judy Garland and a director with more feeling for furniture than people. (“At times, the sets took precedence over the actors; one wag dismissed his 1955 psychiatric drama The Cobweb as The Drapes of Wrath.”) . . . A new book charts the history of the punch line that doubled as a car: the Yugo. . . . The Wall Street Journal reviews three news books about troubled marriages and the different ways people try to fix (or end) them. . . . Eric Ormsby says that Holy Warriors by Jonathan Phillips has “a cool, almost documentary power” and is “the best recent history of the Crusades.” . . . The Times (London) judges that Alex Butterworth’s new book is “exhausting” and “perhaps more dizzying than it needs to be,” but worthwhile nonetheless: “[I]n this rich and passionate account of the world’s first international terrorist campaign — as conducted by anarchist zealots between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the first Russian Revolution of 1905 — the disquieting echoes of our own times are impossible to ignore.”