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.
Friday, August 14th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Brooke Allen assesses John Updike’s series of stories about the Maples, which has just been reissued in a handsome volume. It was originally published as Too Far to Go, which I read and enjoyed many years ago. Updike in his foreword to the book: “That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds.” . . . Joanna Scott looks to correct the “waning” of American interest in the work of Isak Dinesen, who wrote Out of Africa, among many other books. . . . Benjamin Moser has written a biography of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, who, according to a translator, “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.” She’s not well known in the U.S., but in Brazil her “face stares from postage stamps, and her name adorns luxury condominiums.” Dwight Garner judges that, “Mr. Moser, for the most part, is a lucid and very learned tour guide, and his book is a fascinating and welcome introduction to a writer whose best work should be better known in this country.” . . . A new book about genetics argues that it’s “as wrong as it is misguided [to] exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves.” . . . Alison Gopnik (sister of Adam) has written a book about the extraordinary psychology of (human) babies. Josh Lacey says it’s “packed with provocative observations and cunning insights.”
Friday, August 7th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Dwight Garner writes a lively review of a new book about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Crazy fact: Jacobs isn’t mentioned once in Robert Caro’s 1,300-page biography of Moses, The Power Broker
Friday, July 31st, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Raymond Carver had a famously fascinating relationship with his editor, Gordon Lish, who liberally whittled the author’s stories down, to the point where “Lishesque” should perhaps replace “Carveresque” in the minimalist dictionary. James Campbell examines the duo at length: “Carver was the singer but Lish was his producer, and the mood of the sessions is largely his creation.” In the UK, a version of Carver’s stories before Lish got his hands on them is being published this fall. . . . I’m not much of a graphic novel reader, but David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp does look temptingly beautiful on the shelves. Douglas Wolk calls it “a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. [. . .] a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment, even as it’s maddening and even suffocating at times.” . . . Scott Bradfield has fun writing about two recent Bigfoot-related books. He says that P.T. Barnum once featured in his circus a “What-Is-It,” a creature (a.k.a., a dude in a suit) that “represented that half-familiar something that human beings could marvel at while dimly suspecting that somebody might be pulling their leg.” . . . Sam Anderson reviews the latest doorstop from William Vollmann, “the maximalist’s maximalist, a PEZ dispenser of career-capping megavolumes.” I would quote Anderson’s joke from the first paragraph of the review, but it’s a doorstop itself. . . . Lastly, please indulge the horse racing fan in me for a moment. Jim Squires, breeder of the 2001 Kentucky Derby winner, Monarchos, has written Headless Horsemen, about the way the sport’s stewards are driving it into the ground. At least one reviewer finds the book “long on complaints but short on solutions.”
Friday, July 24th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
George Scialabba reviews a biography of Ignazio Silone, an Italian Communist who became disillusioned by Stalin’s influence on the movement. Scialabba calls the new book “excellent,” and believes that Silone’s work is still important because of his “unusual combination of earnestness and skepticism, of lofty idealism and earthy humor. [. . .] Even among the minority of intellectuals who tried to maintain a critical distance from both sides, everyone lost his balance at one time or another — but Silone less often than most.” . . . Dan Baum calls Dave Eggers’ latest “as accurate, sensual and readable an account of Hurricane Katrina as you can find in nonfiction,” though he seems to underplay his own concerns about the book’s research near the end of the review. . . . Brad Jones reviews the new biography of Satchel Paige, a “wonderful, loving portrait of a gigantic figure.” . . . I might be more interested in Peter Kilborn’s Next Stop, Reloville than most, because my family moved from Long Island to Plano, Texas, when I was 14. The book deals with just those kinds of relocations. In the Wall Street Journal, Joel Kotkin says the book has an “appealingly sensible outlook” but “lacks both the statistical rigor and deep historical perspective found in the best such works.”
Friday, July 17th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several books about the pounds put on in America. “Though weight-loss books will doubtless always be more popular,” Kolbert writes, “what might be called weight-gain books, which attempt to account for our corpulence, are an expanding genre.” The essay also includes this aside: “(According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.)” . . . In Lost and Found in Russia, Susan Richards tracks the lives of five people (or couples) over the years when “we all thought the Russians should be celebrating the advent of democracy and freedom, [but] their lives were collapsing around them.” The Guardian says, “Her characters build from being subjects of interest into parts of her life. Friends in the truest sense of the word, they change her.” . . . A question, posed after reading several books published to commemorate the 40th anniversary of literal moonwalking: “Did the moon landings amount to anything more than a spectacular – if costly and dangerous – diversion?” . . . Michael Howard, considering that more than 1,600 books have been written about Winston Churchill, says that “the Churchill story has now been told so often that aspiring biographers need to find something fresh to say if they are to find publishers, and their publishers find readers.” He judges the freshness of two new books about the Prime Minister. . . . Michiko Kakutani reviews Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, the late author’s follow-up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Kakutani writes that the “intricate, puzzlelike story line . . . attests to Mr. Larsson’s improved plotting abilities,” but that “[l]ike many thriller writers, Mr. Larsson . . . is overly fond of coincidence.” The final verdict: “it works.”
Friday, July 10th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Sam Anderson is a fan of “the memoir of literary obsession — that aesthetic wreck at the intersection of biography, confession, literary criticism, travelogue, love letter, and detective story.” So he finds much to enjoy in Elizabeth Hawes’ Camus, a Romance, even though he writes that “As an obsessive, Hawes is sometimes a little dutiful for my taste.” . . . Martin Amis reviews the late John Updike’s final collection of stories. Amis argues that Updike was “in the process of losing his ear.” To prove this, he uses several potent examples from the text and others where his criticism seems overblown. . . . In the Australian Literary Review, a look at “a committed, harrowing and at times oddly self-punishing journey” into the world of killing, from slaughterhouses to battlefields. . . . Ezra Klein reviews a book about walkable cities, and concludes that “if the central insight of the book is that urban policy matters, the central failure of the book is that it doesn’t take urban policy seriously enough.” . . . Joanna Smith Rakoff calls Jill Ciment’s Heroic Measures a “brave, generous, nearly perfect novel.”
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Ron Charles bravely tackles Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes, which “defies description and shreds any expectations you might have for a novel.” The book, fragmentary and brainy, imagines that Mary Shelley had actually run into Frankenstein’s monster as a child. Oh, and the monster is still alive today and the book is written from his perspective. Charles writes, “I’m sure somewhere there’s a reader smart enough (or dishonest enough) to enjoy this novel in all its rich allusiveness, but I spent the entire ordeal lurching along about 50 IQ points behind.” . . . A new biography of Agatha Christie focuses, in part, on 11 days in 1926 when the bestselling novelist of all time disappeared without explanation. . . . Michiko Kakutani, with only slight qualification, praises the new collection of short stories by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. . . . Toby Lichtig reviews two new books about work, and mounts a defense of Alain de Botton (“What de Botton’s critics tend to ignore is his literary brilliance. Label him a “social commentator” rather than a “philosopher” and the arguments against him start to fall away; relabel him a “writer” and they disintegrate entirely.”) . . . Paul Baumann reads God is Back, about the mutually beneficial relationship between business and religion, and comes away unconvinced by the book’s arguments.
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Jill Lepore has a typically brilliant piece in this week’s New Yorker. It begins and ends as a review of recently published parenting memoirs by Michael Lewis and Ayelet Waldman, but it’s really about the fact that “the notion that parenthood is a distinct stage of life, shared by men and women, is historically in its infancy.” . . . David Lynch isn’t my ball of wax, but if he’s yours, Brian Slattery recommends Midnight Picnic by Nick Antosca (“part ghost story, part revenge story, except that the experience of reading it is less like either narrative and more like having a waking nightmare.”). . . . Two brief takes on a brief new bio of George Eliot: Ian Pindar asks why we haven’t started calling Eliot by her real name, Marian Evans; and Rhoda Koenig wonders whether Eliot’s “emphasis on moral instruction” will keep her work from being widely appreciated in the future. . . . David Oshinsky reads a new biography of I. F. Stone and wishes for a more nuanced view. . . . Two new novels owe a debt to Mary McCarthy’s The Group. How do they measure up to their inspiration?
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, in which Nehring focuses on certain relationships throughout history to mount a “rousing defense of imprudent ardor and romantic excess.” (“Any of these love stories submitted to a modern-day advice columnist would come back with a diagnosis of troubling pathologies: co-dependent adulterers, a sexually frustrated agoraphobe, a battered wife. Ms. Nehring wants us to see how impoverished this worldview is.”) . . . In the newest issue of n+1’s online book review, Jessica Weisberg makes a case for the work of the late Edgardo Vega Yunqué. Despite reservations about his strident political writing (“it’s like he’s covering himself in bumper-stickers”), Weisberg argues that his lack of concern about what other people thought was a strength: “The ideas that occasion his winks and asides are so personal that they do just the opposite of most self-conscious writing — they make his books more engaging.” . . . In the slim Sum
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Allen Barra scratches his head over Chuck Palahniuk’s latest. (“Reading Pygmy is like trying to do a crossword puzzle while riding a horse underwater.”) . . . Mark Oppenheimer reviews George Scialabba’s What Are Intellectuals Good For?, “as succinct and companionable a tour through major American thinkers of the past century as you’re likely to get anywhere. . . . Scialabba makes me want to use my library card.” . . . In the new Believer, Steve Hely reviews 11 “imaginary” beach reads. . . . Nicole Lanctot says that Mark Rudd’s account of his time as a political radical “concludes that much of the Weathermen’s activities had the opposite effect of what was intended.”
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.
Robert Sullivan reviews Mannahatta, “more art book than typical natural history tome,” which uses computer-generated imagery to recapture the way New York City looked before it was conquered by concrete
Monday, May 18th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
The lead review in this week’s roundup is David Gates’ stirring examination of Towards Another Summer
Monday, May 11th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
Maud Newton, Mark Twain fan nonpareil, reviews a collection of the author’s previously unpublished writings. . . . Andrew Sullivan admires Robert Wright’s forthcoming The Evolution of God
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
The Beat (The Blog)
Notable reviews that have recently run elsewhere:
Thomas Mallon on Christopher Buckley’s memoir about his famous, recently deceased parents. . . . Michael Ybarra calls Alec Wilkinson’s biography of Pete Seeger, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, “a slight, lionizing and ultimately unsatisfying book” that lets the protest singer off the hook too easily. . . . The New Republic collects several reviews written by and about Nabokov for the magazine. . . . David Horspool considers a new biography of Tom Waits, “more a meditation on Waits’s work than his life.” . . . George Eaton reviews Voodoo Histories, David Aaronovitch’s analysis of conspiracy theories, the “one guaranteed growth industry” even in tough economic times. . . . Judith Thurman reviews a “serious academic reconsideration” of Helen Gurley Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan. . . . Jane Ciabattari admires Colson Whitehead’s latest.
