Times Literary Supplement (August 4, 2023): The twilight zone – Joyce Carol Oates on the novellas of Rachel Ingalls; J.L Austin, philosopher-spy; Adam Thirlwell’s historical fantasy; Hollywood blockbusters; Poverty in the U.S. and more…
Literary Review – August 2023 Issue: How Sugar Became King; Oil, Resin, Vinegar & Paint – “Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography” By David Ekserdjian; Shopping & Plucking – “How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity” By Jill Burke and more…
Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography By David Ekserdjian
Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World By Ulinka Rublack
The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortunate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory drawings, seemed to imbue his productions with an almost divine stamp of approval. Most German painters of the era did not sign their work, but Dürer was eager to assert creative ownership of his productions, obtaining legal protection of his sole right to the trademark monogram.
The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years By Ulbe Bosma
There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
How Yevgeny Prigozhin’s private military company went from fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine to staging a mutiny at home.
By Joshua Yaffa
Babylon was everything forbidden, and looming all around us—and my father tried to protect us from it at all costs.
As the founder of Adventures with Purpose, Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him, Rachel Monroe writes.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 30, 2023:
On this week’s cover, we feature biographies of composers Arnold Schoenberg and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that emphasize the extent to which each was a singular genius attuned to his culture and times; our reviews are by Anthony Tommasini (formerly The Times’s chief classical music critic) and the composer John Adams.
In Patrick Mackie’s “Mozart in Motion,” the socially observant composer embraces modernity.
Musicians tend to be wary of ascribing specific meanings to music or making too much of a piece’s extra-musical associations. In one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, turning to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Leonard Bernstein asked the audience to forget all about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures” and instead concentrate on “pure” music. He then demonstrated how every phrase of the entire first movement is derived from little motifs of notes and rhythms in the first four bars of the score.
John Adams reviews “Schoenberg: Why He Matters,” in which Harvey Sachs explores the artistic, academic and spiritual life of a 20th-century cultural giant.
In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music,
The recording of it now becomes the headline work in Ott’s latest Deutsche Grammophon album, Beethoven. The pianist has paired it with a series of solo works, including “Für Elise” and the “Moonlight” Sonata.
By Tessa Hadley | Knopf
Moments of “intense insight and recognition” animate a dozen new stories from a master of the form. Review by Sam Sacks.
By Alan Paul | St. Martin’s
Even after the loss of two of their founding members, the Georgia-based band created a country-blues sound that captivated audiences. Review by Gavin Edwards.
By James R. Hansen | Pegasus
Tom McClean faced frostbite, nonstop gales and waves that looked like skyscrapers. A 15-foot shark followed him for days. He named it Bluey. Review by Bill Heavey.
By Martin Peretz | Wicked Son
The pugnacious editor and publisher looks back on his career putting the New Republic at the center of a generation’s political conversation. Review by Tunku Varadarajan.
By Amanda Goodall | PublicAffairs
Should a doctor run a hospital? An engineer a tech company? Workers seem to value a boss with skill and knowledge in the core business. Review by David A. Price.
By Peter Turchin | Penguin Press
The widening wealth gap in the U.S. has been fueled by elite overproduction—a combination that, to some, can only signal an imminent state breakdown. Review by Dominic Green.
By Gunnar Broberg | Princeton
The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus bestowed an orderly taxonomy on the natural world, but his love of animals and plants was quirky and personal. Review by Christoph Irmscher.
By Amul Thapar | Regnery Gateway
A federal judge argues that when we follow the arguments of Supreme Court Justice Thomas in applying the Constitution, the weak and the powerless stand to benefit the most. Review by David J. Garrow.
By C.W. Goodyear | Simon & Schuster
James Garfield’s ambitious career—from janitor to Union general, then from Congress to the presidency—was cut short by an assassin. Review by Richard Norton Smith.
Times Literary Supplement (July 28, 2023): War diaries – Marci Shore on Ukrainian accounts from the front line; Richard Russo reconstructed; Boris and other bounders; Family secrets and lies; and more…
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ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
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THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.
From the issue of July 31, 2023
In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them.
It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water.
Boomers Daily 