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
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.”
Monday, March 8th, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
James Wood writes about realism and David Shields’ recent “manifesto” about, among other things, his distaste for conventional fiction, before settling into a review of Chang-Rae Lee’s latest novel, The Surrendered—“a book that is commendably ambitious, extremely well written, powerfully moving in places, and, alas, utterly conventional.” . . . Pagan Kennedy reviews Marilyn Johnson’s new book about librarians in the digital age: “This is one of those books, in the vein of Mary Roach’s Stiff (about human cadavers), that tackle a big topic by taking readers on a chapter-by-chapter tour of eccentric characters and unlikely locations. Given Johnson’s attractions to wild tangents, the journey often dissolves into a jumble. It is a testament to her skill as a writer that she remains fascinating, even in the throes of A.D.D.” . . . Stephen Burt reviews a collection of the great Kay Ryan’s poetry: “If you are the sort of reader who underlines witty, widely applicable remarks, you may underline something on every page. You may even get tired of underlining: Sage, mordant general claims about life are almost the only kind of poem she writes.” . . . Christopher Tayler with a long look at the five volumes of memoirs by Clive James, culminating in a review of the newest, which covers James’ years in TV. . . . Ian McEwan’s latest, Solar, will be published in the U.S. at the end of this month. Early reviews from the UK are quite positive. Peter Kemp says that “sizzling lucidity distinguishes this enormously entertaining novel about rationality and unreason,” which is “a comedy every bit as brilliant as its title might suggest.”
Monday, March 1st, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
This review of The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, which will be published in the U.S. later this month, piqued my interest. (“The contrasts between would-be assassin and intended victim are straightforward and obvious, but in this oblique and subtle book Frances Stonor Saunders finds correspondences as well, tracing through their two lives thematic threads: nationalism, madness, religious fervor, politics as theatre and – above all – the instability of moral judgment.”) . . . Louis Menand reviews Manufacturing Depression by Gary Greenberg and The Emperor’s New Drugs by Irving Kirsch: “Both authors are hostile to the current psychotherapeutic regime, but for reasons that are incompatible.” . . . At n+1, Charles Petersen reviews the “massive” book that accompanies Ken Burns’ recent documentary about the national parks. (“Nature has no special ability to reconcile, particularly when burdened with all the weight of the exceptional. Thoreau famously said that we find in the wild only what we bring there ourselves.”) . . . The Economist reviews a collection of the work of New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway, “a wry observer of the city’s low life, from the 1930s into the 1960s.” . . . Marisa Silver says that Eric Puchner’s Model Home, about a family that moves from Wisconsin to California in the mid-1980s, “cannily trades on the very characteristics that have come to define a recognizable California ‘experience’ in order to blast them apart, revealing the uncertainty and terror beneath the glossy postcard version we cling to and dismiss.” . . . Tim Martin digests four books (and nearly 2,500 pages) about the history and future of . . . the book.
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Joe Queenan reviews Jazz, an encyclopedic work by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux: “It is vast, thorough, illuminating, thought-provoking, beautifully written and very entertaining. It is also dense, demanding and fundamentally a scholarly text.” . . . “Almost every page here contains an anecdotal gem”: Robert Sandall reviews the memoir of a 1970s rock writer who “became the trusted ally and drug buddy of so many of the rock aristocracy.” . . . Jonathan Shapiro reviews the latest novel by Henning Mankell, and uses the opportunity to judge between the work of Mankell and his fellow Swedish author, bestseller Stieg Larsson: “Like the songs of ABBA, Larsson is sometimes insipid but never boring; like the plays of August Strindberg, Mankell is often dull but never stupid.” . . . In Chasing the White Dog journalist Max Watman goes on the trail of moonshine, “an underground industry that shows no signs of letting up.” . . . Michael Greenberg reviews Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby, “both a scientific and romantic book, a result of Gopnik’s charming willingness to imagine herself inside the consciousness of young children.” . . . Ross Posnock finds many things to recommend in Terry Castle’s new book of personal essays, The Professor, not least the way it might complicate our feelings about the “cardboard figure of fun” that is its title. . . . Mark Holcomb reviews Lorraine Adams’ new novel: “Adopting the propulsion and framework of an intricately plotted political thriller, The Room and the Chair mercilessly critiques our addiction to narratives of Western exceptionalism even as it compels us to turn its pages.”
Friday, January 29th, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Garry Kasparov reviews a book about chess and artificial intelligence, a springboard for his thoughts about the state of the game and technology. Fascinating. . . . Matt Ridley reviews a “witty and incisive” book about the “quest to end aging.” . . . Alice Kaplan writes a wonderfully brainy-but-breezy essay about “volumes assessing literary reputations during the years of the Nazi occupation of France.” . . . Richard Posner writes a long, characteristically intelligent piece about the history of miscegenation laws in the U.S. (“People take pride in being descended from Mayflower passengers, or from Revolutionary War veterans, though after a very few generations the traits that distinguished an honored ancestor, even if genetic, disappears in the genetic reshuffling that occurs in every new generation.”) . . . The Economist judges that Peter Carey’s latest novel, a fictional retelling of Tocqueville’s travels in America, “has all the quirky qualities that we have come to expect from Peter Carey: a winding narrative, a mass of vivid historical detail, and some very lively writing.” . . . The Guardian calls Jon McGregor’s new novel, Even the Dogs, “a [powerful] fragmentary group portrait” of addicts and vagrants who move in and out of an empty flat over several years. . . . Jeff VanderMeer calls a new novel about Depression-era bank robbers “a rip-roaring yarn that manages to be both phantasmagorical and historically accurate. In its labyrinthine, luminous narrative, reminiscent of Michael Chabon’s best fiction, readers will find powerful parallels to the present-day.”
Friday, January 15th, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Tom Bissell writes a terrific review of Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America by Elizabeth Fraterrigo, a book he calls dry but careful and wide-ranging: “Fraterrigo has given us the most laudably sober and analytically rigorous book ever written about an adult magazine. While her prose strays into occasional thesisese, her research is phenomenally thorough and her conclusions are bold enough to be interesting and modest enough to be feasible.” . . . Leo Robson elegantly recommends Frank Kermode’s new book about E.M. Forster. . . . Christopher Hitchens admires the work of J.G. Ballard, “our great specialist in catastrophe.” . . . Jad Adams assesses a new biography of Thomas de Quincey, “the first – and still the finest – literary dope fiend.” . . . David Ulin says that Robert Stone’s new collection of stories “may not represent a complete return to form, but it’s far more satisfying” than his previous two books and “brilliant in places.” . . . Jessica Loudis believes that Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas “should be required reading for anybody considering a PhD in the humanities.”
Friday, January 8th, 2010
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Ah, goodbye, year-end lists; hello again, substantial reviews. A strong initial batch for 2010: If you read one thing today, make it James Salter’s mesmerizing review of William Langewiesche’s book about “the Miracle on the Hudson.” . . . Mary Midgley expertly summarizes the appeal of a new book about the brain’s hemispheres. . . . Provocative defenses of the suburbs are, in my opinion, all too rare. Here’s one now: “The publisher’s blurb introduces The Freedoms of Suburbia, Paul Barker’s enchanting and persuasive pictorial essay, with a nervous defiance as if the book were proposing free heroin for toddlers.” . . . Dwight Garner says we’ll be reading books about the current financial crisis for decades, but “[f]ew if any of these books will be as pleasurable — and by that I mean as literate or as wickedly funny — as John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.” . . . Michael Agger reviews You Are Not a Gadget, tech guru Jaron Lanier’s manifesto/lament about what the Web has become: “Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. [...] But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery.” . . . David Yaffe calls a new biography of Thelonious Monk “exhaustive, necessary and, as of now, definitive.” . . . Adam Shatz reviews the work of Orhan Pamuk, “who writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction.” . . . Justin Taylor reviews The Book of Jokes by Momus, with a twist. The Believer asked him to review it anonymously—not Taylor; the book: “[S]oon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication.”
Friday, December 18th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Thomas DePietro reviews a new, beautifully designed three-volume collection of Gahan Wilson’s cartoons for Playboy. (“Wilson, in short, is very much a creature of his time, the postwar era of domestic prosperity and nuclear anxiety. Without ever losing sight of the humor in it all, Wilson reveals in these many cartoons a disgust with the American war machine, rage over possible Armageddon, and fear of ecological catastrophe.”) . . . A review of several creepy books, including two that “offer an intriguing overview of how the supernatural short story has developed in the U.S. over the past 200 years.” . . . Philip Hoare reviews The Bedside Book of Beasts by Graeme Gibson, a lavishly illustrated look at predators and their prey. . . . In 1993, a freight ship called the Golden Venture got stuck approaching New York, with nearly 300 undocumented Chinese on board. In The Snakehead, Patrick Radden Keefe explores the underground economy and intrigue in Chinatown and around the world. Ted Conover says that “Keefe has done an immense amount of research around the globe; if the Golden Venture beaching was the tip of an iceberg, then here, finally, is the iceberg.” . . . The Economist calls Nicholas Wade’s The Faith Instinct “a masterly book. It lays the basis for a rich dialogue between biology, social science and religious history.”
Friday, December 11th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Geordie Williamson reviews the recently published one-volume condensation of Joseph Frank’s massive biography of Dostoevsky. (“Far from burying the writer in detail, Frank’s immense knowledge of 19th-century Russia helps synchronize Dostoevsky with his times.”) . . . Speaking of condensation, Damion Searls has trimmed Thoreau’s two million-word journal to one volume. Geoff Wisner approves of the result. . . . Whether or not it’s “the best stocking stuffer ever for the bibliophile,” as Robert Messenger claims, a new book about architects and their libraries does look beautiful. . . . Of two recent books about basketball, Jason Zengerle writes that one “already feels a little dated” and the other “admirably reaches for timelessness.” He concludes that they each would have benefited from a bit of the other’s approach. . . . Michael Berry says Michael Crichton’s posthumously published novel is “a diverting coda to a remarkable popular writing career.”
Friday, December 4th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Leonard Cassuto says that “In Joan Schenkar, [Patricia] Highsmith has found a biographer who does meaningful justice to both her powerful work and her uncomfortable existence.” . . . Mark Mazower’s new book, No Enchanted Palace, examines the “ideological origins of the UN.” . . . Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest explores the ideological origins (and pernicious effects) of “the mass delusion that is positive thinking.” . . . John G. Rodwan, Jr., is not impressed by Michael Chabon’s thoughts about fatherhood. (“He acknowledges that he offers ‘depressingly trite’ statements and ‘tiresome, empty’ observations. He fails to take the next step of refraining from making them.”) . . . George Scialabba reviews a new history of Communism by “a splendid storyteller with a fascinating tale to tell.”
Friday, November 20th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Christopher Hitchens reviews a forthcoming authorized biography of Arthur Koestler: “Otto Katz once said to [Koestler], ‘We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes, but yours isn’t a complex—it’s a cathedral.’ Koestler liked this remark so much that he included it in his autobiography, thus attaining the status of one who could actually brag about his inferiority complex as if size mattered.” . . . I think I’ll award Sentence of the Week to M. John Harrison, for this, from his review of Stephen King’s latest mammoth, Under the Dome: “There are many different kinds of guns, and by the end everything but a nuclear weapon has been set off, in a kind of localized Stalingrad of the hick mind.” . . . Bernard Porter offers a provocative review of a history of the MI5, Britain’s secret intelligence agency. . . . Akiva Gottlieb reviews The Good Soldiers, David Finkel’s close-up account of the surge in Iraq: “Finkel writes concisely and vividly about trauma and regret, leaving us defenseless against the steadily accruing collateral damage of combat.” . . . Michael Greenberg reviews Kay Redfield Jamison’s new memoir about her husband’s death: “Inevitably, it will be compared to Joan Didion’s memoir of her husband’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking. But Nothing Was the Same is a very different kind of book, told with less writerly detail than Didion’s but more direct emotion.” . . . John Sutherland believes that the second volume of T. S. Eliot’s letters will “blow away some of the murk befouling the poet’s reputation.”
Friday, November 13th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Josh Levin reviews Bill Simmons’ latest, saying it represents the wildly popular sports writer “at his best and worst”: “The Book of Basketball mostly fulfills the writer’s preposterous aim to relate the entire history of the league, lay out the philosophical underpinnings of winning basketball teams, and rank history’s top 96 players. At the same time, The Book of Basketball exacerbates the worst tendencies of a writer who’s never mistaken brevity for wit.” . . . At Bookforum, John Banville is mostly happy about the much-discussed decision to publish Nabokov’s unfinished novel: “This edition is a triumph of the book maker’s art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly. There will be those who will deplore the production as gimmicky, but the greatest magicians depend on gimmicks for their most elegant illusions.” . . . Second Pass contributor John Davidson weighs in on Philip Roth’s latest, concluding that “there is a nagging sense in [Roth’s] most recent work of ideas left incomplete, of characters and themes that haven’t been fully developed.” (continues)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Hilary Mantel reviews Tormented Hope, a study of nine notable hypochondriacs that will be published in the U.S. in early 2010. She likes the book (”full of insight and beautifully constructed, with a wealth of cultural reference and a breadth of imagination behind them”), and her review is full of its own rewards: “All of us treat [our bodies] as other; they are not our essential selves, they are what we drag around with us, a suitcase or steamer trunk with dubious, ever shifting contents, a piece of luggage we didn’t pack ourselves.” . . . In Atomic Obsession, John Mueller tries to quell fears about nuclear weapons, in the hands of terrorists or others. Stuart Reid says the book soothes some misplaced anxiety, but ignores the reality of deterrence theory. . . . Elaine Showalter sizes up William Shawcross’ biography of the Queen Mother, an “enormous record of a dutiful and privileged life.” (continues)
Friday, October 30th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Daniel Menaker reviews Tim Page’s memoir about growing up with Asperger’s: “The writing here is for the most part clear, conversational, mordantly funny. In fact, you wonder how the author can have such a wide palette of expressiveness, given the nature of his nature.” . . . A smart piece by Andrew Delbanco on two new books about education, and why “despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence.” . . . Gordon Haber reviews six recent books about God vs. No God. On the longest of them, Robert Wright’s 567-page The Evolution of God: “He consistently provides an unnecessary level of detail, which creates a book that refuses to end. Days after I finally got through it all, I flinched whenever I got a text message, for fear that it was Wright with further elucidation.” . . . In the fifth issue of n+1’s book review, Marco Roth reads Caleb Crain’s self-published book of blog writing: “Crain handles [all topics] with an unflagging open-mindedness and intelligence, as though conducting a course on how to be a responsible polymath.” . . . Henry Hitchings compares the seventh edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature with previous versions. Final verdict: “a scrupulously produced, smartly laid-out, academically serious and at the same time relishably browsable book, replete with valuable information.”
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
The Economist says that readers of Sweet Thunder, Wil Haygood’s new biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, “get two histories: of boxing and of Harlem in its glory days during the first half of the 20th century.” In The Washington Post, Gerald Early says that, though Haygood “seems to run out of gas” near the end of Robinson’s life, his book is still “certainly one of the best biographies of a boxer ever written.” . . . Marco Roth smartly considers the “rise of the neuronovel,” and wonders why, in works by Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen and others, “novelists have ceded their ground to science.” . . . Irvine Welsh says that it’s “somewhat erroneous and unquestioningly indulgent – but nonetheless tempting – to think of [John] Irving as literature’s Bruce Springsteen.” Welsh really likes Irvingsteen’s latest. The blurb: “[B]ig-hearted, brilliantly written and superbly realized. [A]bsolutely unmissable.” . . . Alexandra Jacobs reviews Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man, about his yearlong experiment living as an extreme environmentalist — in his Fifth Avenue apartment. (“There’s a certain problem with branding oneself a radical environmentalist superhero and then letting a real old-fashioned book about the experience roll luxuriously off the presses.”) . . . Elizabeth Lowry on “the most informative and entertaining art book you are likely to read this year.”
Friday, October 16th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Two critics on the other side of the Atlantic praise a new biography of Charles Dickens. John Bowen: “At nearly 700 pages, this is a lightweight next to many of its precursors, several of which easily break the thousand-page barrier. But it is a triumph of compression, and immediately takes its place as the most authoritative, fair-minded and navigable of modern biographies.” And Simon Callow: “Cumulatively, it is profoundly moving, chronicling the constant restless interaction between the life and the work.” . . . John Gray reads a big new book about the history of democracy, and praises half of its conclusions. . . . Dwight Garner finds insight in John Keegan’s new history of the American Civil War, but wonders at the detached tone: “Distant and chilly, The American Civil War seems to have been written by a mainframe computer buried deep in a fortified bunker.” . . . John Self finds himself enjoying Sarah Waters’ new novel: “I’d read her last two (also Booker shortlisted) novels, Fingersmith and The Night Watch, and liked them to varying degrees without doing anything mad like declaring myself a fan, or hanging onto them. These tempered expectations meant that her new novel turned out to be a pleasant surprise.” . . . David Thomson writes two reviews of new Hollywood-star bios: A new look at Clint Eastwood that draws heavily on previous sources; and an oral biography of Robert Altman. (”[A] smart, amusing, lively book, full of anecdotes and a generous step toward perceiving the glorious and perverse ways of Altman himself.”) I’ve always found Altman overrated myself, but that’s a discussion for another time.
Friday, October 9th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
David Ulin reviews Francine Prose’s new book about Anne Frank’s diary: “There’s no criticism, Prose argues, in calling Frank’s book crafted; if anything, the opposite is true.” . . . A British writer living in France reviews four books about France by British writers. (“[W]hat really makes us obsess over the French is that they evidently do not much care what we think of them.”) . . . Philip Pullman reviews a book that sounds like it might appeal to anyone who feels strongly about books as objets d’art. (“[T]he main thing to say about this book is that it is a stupendously good piece of design. The author and the publisher have taken real, prolonged, and exhaustive pains to make a beautiful book, and succeeded.”) . . . Simon Critchley and Julian Barnes have both written about coming to terms with death. Alexander Provan says they have created a new genre: “End-of-Self Help.” . . . Norman Rush reviews James Ellroy’s Blood’s a Rover, and says that the trilogy it caps off is “a major achievement in high parody.” . . . Jeremy Treglown reviews an “absorbing” new biography of W. Somerset Maugham, “an extraordinary, extravagant, generous and bitter artist.”
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Peter Kramer believes that Richard Powers’ latest novel is the victim of bad timing: Recent scientific findings might render its central plot point irrelevant. Kramer sympathizes: “My only novel concerns a thoughtful anarchist who communicates with those he loves through blowing up buildings. It appeared to mostly good notices in August 2001; after Sept. 11, the book was all but undiscussable.” . . . Reviewing a massive new anthology edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, Laura Miller says, “You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published A New Literary History of America — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily.” . . . Michael Sandel is a professor at Harvard who offers an enormously popular course on moral philosophy. He’s now written a book based on the course, and Edward Skidelsky finds that “Sandel’s insistence on the inescapably ethical character of political debate is enormously refreshing — a riposte to the arid and evasive legalism of so much recent liberal thinking.” . . . In People Like Us, reporter Joris Luyendijk argues that it is “impossible for TV in particular or indeed for any journalist to explain what [is] happening in the Middle East.” The Dutch edition of the book sold 250,000 copies. Now it’s available in English. . . . Edmund White recommends a collection of Michael Greenberg’s “sharp, sensitive, even painful” 1,200-word essays for the Times Literary Supplement. . . . James Wood considers A.S. Byatt’s latest.
Friday, September 25th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
This rave about a six-volume, illustrated edition of Vincent van Gogh’s letters makes me want to start saving money for it. (“Intimate, compelling and comprehensive, the letters make a serious formal biography both redundant and impossible.”) . . . Speaking of illustrated, a look at “a glorious new full-color visual history of the USSR” that draws from “one of the world’s most admired collections of Russian posters, photographs and graphics.” . . . Natasha Wimmer believes there “is room for a resurgence, even a resurrection” of the work of Mercè Rodoreda. Her books included The Time of the Doves. (Wimmer: “many thousands of books have been written about the experience of the Spanish Civil War, but none has equaled it.”) . . . Ross Simonini reviews The Book of Jokes, a novel by pop-music experimentalist Momus. (“In the way that Robert Coover and John Barth reinterpreted fairy tales and American urban myths in their fiction, Momus uses the folklore of humor. [T]he book is less a single narrative than what it says it is: a novel-in-jokes, an episodic account of the joke’s ability to grab attention and flip expectation.”) . . . Scott Simon says that half a century after it was published, Allen Drury’s novel Advise and Consent “remains the definitive Washington tale.” . . . Andrew O’Hagan takes a long, absorbing look at Samuel Johnson.
Friday, September 18th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Caleb Crain reviews Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Dark, “a bighearted, rambling new survey of American culture in the nineteen-thirties.” Comparing it to Dickstein’s cultural history of the 1960s, Gates of Eden, Dwight Garner calls Dancing in the Dark “a heavier, slower, more lumbering book, at times a hard-drive-emptying round of plot summaries and historical filler.” . . . Louisa Gilder calls a new biography of eccentric physicist Paul Dirac “a thought-provoking meditation on human achievement, limitations and the relations between the two.” . . . Seed magazine also recommends the Dirac bio (“a tour de force filled with insight and revelation. [A]n unprecedented and gripping view of Dirac not only as a scientist, but also as a human being.”), along with several other recent science books. . . . Dexter Filkins says that Jon Krakauer is a “masterly writer and reporter,” but that his book about the death of Pat Tillman feels padded, at least a hundred pages too long. . . . Steve Almond marvels at recent right-wing bestsellers, “in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia.”
Friday, September 11th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Lorrie Moore’s return from a decade-long absence with A Gate at the Stairs has rightfully set off a flurry of coverage. The Times gave it the paper’s patented double-barrel coverage, with a Michiko Kakutani review in the daily paper and Jonathan Lethem’s take in the Sunday Book Review. Kakutani liked it (“[Moore’s] most powerful novel yet”) and, um, so did Lethem (“It’s a novel that brandishes some ‘big’ material: racism, war, etc. — albeit in Moore’s resolutely insouciant key.”) Claire Dederer says the presence of so much plot is “quite a change for Moore” and the novel is a “brilliant feat.” Second Pass contributor John Davidson finds the first half of the novel a disappointment, “Yet miraculously — indeed, when it’s almost too late — Moore turns her story around.” . . . In The Nation, Kim Phillips-Fein rounds up a group of books about the conservative movement in America and offers a smart analysis of them. (“For conservatives, it seems that their most crushing defeats herald their greatest victories. Given these Houdini acts, it is surprising that until recently there has been no significant body of scholarship on the history of postwar conservatism.”) (continues)
Friday, September 4th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Bookforum has an early review of Jonathan Lethem’s latest, which goes on sale in mid-October. I’ll see for myself, but the reviewer, Hari Kunzru, is not a fan:
At times, Chronic City is almost a caricature of the type of writing James Wood skewered as “hysterical realism.” The irritating names, the hyperactive plotting, the relative lack of interest in psychology, and the general atmosphere of conspiracy and connectivity are all hallmarks of a genre that (pace Wood) vastly expanded the possibilities of the postwar novel but has now ossified into a repertoire of gestures, most of which Chronic City seems compelled to repeat.
Elsewhere, E. L. Doctorow’s latest, which imagines the life of famous New York shut-ins the Collyer brothers, also has critics considerably less than ecstatic. In the Times, Michiko Kakutani says that Doctorow has “produc[ed] a slight, unsatisfying, Poe-like story that turns out to be a study in morbid psychology.” . . . In the just-published September issue of Open Letters, Sam Sacks writes about Doctorow’s novel (“the book suffers from a want of invention. [It] feels simultaneously slight and verbose.”) along with two other New York novels, by Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín. . . . Edward Luttwak manages the rare deeply smart-and-breezy combination a review of two books, one a history of Central Eurasia and another about Attila the Hun. (“The extraordinary reputation of Attila and his Huns requires an explanation, because they had so much competition.”) He also unequivocally criticizes the inability of academics to confront important aspects of military history. . . . Christian House praises a “bibliomemoir” by British academic Rick Gekoski, who guides us on “a tour of 25 books that are particularly special to him, we learn the part each played in his romantic, professional and intellectual development.”
Friday, August 28th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Johann Hari charts the contours of Tracy Kidder’s new book, about “Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a 24-year-old man who had narrowly survived a genocide in two countries and suddenly in 1994 found himself on a flight to a place he had only heard of — America,” and asks provocative questions about what certain nonfiction projects (and certain traumatized human beings) can and can’t accomplish. . . . Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist
Friday, August 21st, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
The Economist says that a new book about the relationship between Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels does “a brilliant job of setting the two men’s endeavours in the context of the political, social and philosophical currents at the time.” The friendship certainly had its share of irony. Engels worked in a family business he hated to support Marx’s writing. (”For the next 20 years Engels worked grumpily away, handing over half his generous income to an ever more demanding Marx.”) . . . Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, Too Much Happiness, won’t be out in the U.S. until mid-November, but reviewers in the UK are sizing it up. (“there’s a persistent idea of her as an underpraised housewife-genius from the Canadian backwoods, perhaps because it’s easier to talk about the literary politics of being a woman, Canadian or a short-story writer than it is to give a sense of her densely packed but effortless-seeming work.”) . . . John Self reviews F. Scott Fitzgerald’s May Day, a novella recently reissued by Melville House. . . . In November, the Grand Concourse in the Bronx turns 100 years old. Jerome Charyn assesses a “passionate and deeply elegiac” book about its history. . . . Half as old as the Concourse is Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, the best-selling jazz record of all time. A new book “traces Kind of Blue’s influence on late 20th century music” and considers every other aspect of the work.
