Arts & Culture: The New Criterion — Dec 2023
Category Archives: Books
Reviews: Best Books On Aging And Retirement
HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement
By Harvard Business Review | Harvard Business Review Press (256 pages)
What sets this retirement guide apart from others is the perspectives brought by the contributing writers. In addition to presenting case histories and addressing the best ways to assess your life goals and financial needs, the authors discuss specific steps to help you think about encore careers in coaching, consulting or teaching; practical tips for coping with different stresses; and how to view the career you’re leaving as a period of “preretirement” to help you evaluate what comes next.
Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing
By Abigail Thomas | Golden Notebook Press (196 pages)
Veteran book editor, agent and author Abigail Thomas begins her third memoir with the observation that at 80, her thoughts can sometimes be “interrupted by a memory so vivid that I am in two places at once.” Perhaps a jarring thought to some, but to Thomas, such moments can be “an inexpensive, unpatented, readily available form of time travel,” and readers who choose to accompany her will be rewarded.
Funny gripes, wistful reflections, rueful memories and realizations about aging fill these pages. Some of the best entries are about her days as a single mother of three living in Greenwich Village and protesting the Vietnam War. “The times that were a-changing have changed,” Thomas writes, “but for a little while I’m going to ignore what went off the rails, and let myself remember what innocence and hope felt like.”
Somebody’s Fool
By Richard Russo | Knopf (464 pages)
The closing piece of the “North Bath” trilogy by Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Russo is a wondrous novel that captures the changing pace of small-town life in the 21st century. The setting once again is a fictional, blue-collar community in upstate New York whose senior residents must grapple not only with the daily indignities of financial troubles and aging bodies, but with intrusions from the inhabitants of a more-prosperous neighboring town.
No worries if you are new to these books. You can jump right in to enjoy the fun even if you haven’t read the previous two (“Nobody’s Fool” and “Everyone’s Fool”). You can also expand your immersion in Russo’s world by streaming the 1994 movie of “Nobody’s Fool,” starring Paul Newman in an Oscar-nominated role.
The Measure of Our Age
By M.T. Connolly | PublicAffairs (384 pages)
In this compassionate book, M.T. Connolly, founding head of the Justice Department’s Elder Justice Initiative, lays out many of the problems associated with giving and finding care for seniors in our aging society. And as its subtitle, “Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life,” suggests, she also has ideas for solutions to help avert a worse crisis.
Connolly draws on research, interviews and her own experience to explore these issues. “Our norms and systems have not kept up with our longevity, sometimes with terrible, and usually preventable, consequences,” she writes. She is optimistic, however, that “change is possible—and some is even under way” on community, federal and individual levels.
One thing that needs to continue, she writes, is “increasing our capacity to make meaning of aging, and of our fleeting time on Earth, by paying more attention to the power of purpose, curiosity, stories, awe, and love.”
The Well-Lived Life
By Dr. Gladys McGarey | Atria Books (256 pages)
To remain healthy in mind and body, consider the wisdom of Dr. Gladys McGarey, still a consulting physician at the age of 102, and co-founder of the American Holistic Medical Association. McGarey sums up her approach to life in six lessons, hence the book’s subtitle: “A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age.” We won’t list them, and they are probably not what you would expect.
Based on her own experience—some of it difficult and emotionally draining—she places huge importance on the ability to regain perspective and purpose after a physical illness or crisis. This is essential for healing, medically and emotionally, says McGarey, whose own life story reveals she has had to practice what she preaches. At 69, she had to find a new path when her husband and medical partner of 46 years left her for a younger woman.
Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 16, 2023
Bad Blood – ‘We’ve messed up, boys’
‘In the UK between 1970 and 1991, about 1250 people with bleeding disorders were infected with HIV (and many of them with Hepatitis C, too); by the time the Infected Blood Inquiry began, about three-quarters had died, the majority of them from HIV-related causes.
By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood
by Cara McGoogan.
Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal
by Caroline Wheeler.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic
‘Nearly eighty years after she first starred in a film, Taylor is famous for two things: her intense screen beauty and her many marriages (eight of them, two to Richard Burton). But at least as central to her life were her close and enduring friendships with men.’
By Bee Wilson
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov 10, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (November 10, 2023): The new issue features The day everything changed – The war in Israel and Gaza; Russia at war; Animal liberation revisited; Publisher to the world; Maison Gainsbourg in Paris; and more…
The New York Times Book Review – November 5, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (November 5, 2023): This week’s issue features music memoirs and biographies crammed into a single season including Madonna, Tupac Shakur, Sly Stone, Britney Spears, Thurston Moore, Jeff Tweedy and — soon — Barbra Streisand…
The Muchness of Madonna
Mary Gabriel’s biography is as thorough as its subject is disciplined. But in relentlessly defending the superstar, where’s the party?
MADONNA: A Rebel Life, by Mary Gabriel
“I want to be alone,” Greta Garbo’s dancer character famously said in “Grand Hotel,” a quote permanently and only semi-accurately attached to the actress after she retreated from public life. Garbo was first on the list of Golden Agers in one of Madonna’s biggest hits, “Vogue,” but the pop star has long seemed to embody this maxim’s very opposite. She wants to be surrounded, as if with Dolby sound.
Rock ’n’ Soul: The Amazing Story of Sly & the Family Stone
At the age of 80, Sly Stone has finally produced his memoir, and it gives a strong sense of this giant’s voice and sensibility.
‘By Alan Light
THANK YOU (FALETTINME BE MICE ELF AGIN): A Memoir, by Sly Stone with Ben Greenman
It is difficult to convey just how astoundingly unlikely it is that this book exists. Sly Stone is one of pop music’s truest geniuses and greatest mysteries, who essentially disappeared four decades ago in a cloud of drugs and legal problems after recording several albums’ worth of incomparable, visionary songs. Fleeting, baffling, blink-and-you-miss-him appearances at his 1993 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and a 2006 Grammy tribute only served as reminders that he was still alive and still not well.
The New York Review Of Books – November 23, 2023
Inhumane Times
Israel’s current war seems to be as much a brutal insistence on the collective punishment of the Palestinian people as an offensive against Hamas.
The scenes of devastation in Israel’s south on October 7 were almost beyond description. Children killed in their beds, babies taken from their mothers’ arms, the elderly slaughtered in their kitchens. Kfar Aza, a kibbutz close to the separation barrier with Gaza, was burned nearly to the ground: a charnel house. Between a quarter and a third of nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz’s residents were killed or kidnapped. Roughly 10 percent of Kibbutz Be’eri’s population was murdered. At least a dozen of tiny Kibbutz Holit’s two hundred members are dead. The streets of the city of Sderot were littered with bodies. At an outdoor rave near Kibbutz Reim, more than 260 young men and women were gunned down as they tried to flee.
Camus on Tour
Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.
Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, translated from the French by Ryan Bloom
Nothing in a professional writer’s life more resembles the life of a traveling salesman than the literary book tour. The superficial difference between writers on tour and salesmen on the road is that writers are encouraged to imagine themselves prized personae whose pitch is eagerly awaited by the anonymous crowd, whereas salesmen know themselves to be an intrusion, albeit one with an edge. While both are beggars at the gate, each one singing for a bit of supper, salesmen are independent entrepreneurs, pretty much calling their own shots; writers, on the other hand, are performers in someone else’s show—a talk at ten, a class at twelve, a panel at three, a reading at seven, and oh, did I forget the ten or twelve interviews tucked in at every break in the day?—all the while being dragged around by people otherwise known as “handlers” who every half-hour tell them how much they are loved, how much their work is prized, how many lives it has changed, and yes, they know how tired you must be by now, but would you mind giving just one more very small interview, this guy’s been waiting all day to talk to you.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov 3, 2023
Times Literary Supplement (November 3, 2023): The new issue features Rock Hudson and the art of docudrama; Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm continued; Wife to Mr. Orwell; Whitman’s war diaries; Britain passes the chaos test and more…
Books: Literary Review Magazine – November 2023
Literary Review – November 2023: The new issue features Sex, Satire & Revolution; The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century; Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago – The Britannias: An Island Quest; and more…
And It’s Go, Go, Go!
The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century
By Kassia St Clair
Cost, not a lack of courage, ensured that the entry field for the 1907 Peking to Paris car race was small. A massive two-thousand-franc deposit (equivalent to a professor’s annual salary) kept all but five of the aspiring contestants out of the race. That exclusion, as Kassia St Clair demonstrates in her captivating history of one of the most challenging endurance trials in the history of motoring, was precisely what the organisers intended.
Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
The Britannias: An Island Quest
By Alice Albinia
In July 2023 Orkney Islands Council voted to explore alternative governmental arrangements for the archipelago. One option proposed by the council leader was for it to become a self-governing territory of Norway, the kingdom which lost control of Orkney to Scotland in 1468. The episode – in reality, a smart political stunt in a row over the Scottish government’s transport policy – attracted extraordinary international attention. In the UK press, it was treated with an uneven mixture of constitutional soul-searching and patronising amusement at the Passport to Pimlico-styleantics of the Orcadians.
Books: World Literature Today – November 2023
Artists of Iraqi Descent Celebrate Roots and Global Belonging
Traveling Mexico City’s Body by Metro
The Cheikh Bookstore: One of Few Still Standing in Algeria
The New York Times Book Review – October 29, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 29, 2023): This week’s issue features “A Haunting on the Hill,” by Shirley Jackson; ‘I Feel a Human Deterioration’ – making sense of the violence and loss in Israel; Is It Time to Pull Up Stakes and Head for Mars? – Probably not, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue in “A City on Mars”….
A Fitting — and Frightening — Homage to ‘The Haunting of Hill House’
Apparitions, black hares and time warps festoon the pages of Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill,” set in the same moldering mansion as Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel.
‘I Feel a Human Deterioration’
The Israeli writer Etgar Keret has spent the last few weeks trying to make sense of the violence and loss around him. So far, he can’t.
Is It Time to Pull Up Stakes and Head for Mars?
Probably not, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith argue in “A City on Mars.”
By W. M. Akers
A CITY ON MARS: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Face it, folks. Earth is finished. It’s overheated, overcrowded, overregulated. It’s the ultimate fixer-upper, a dump we inherited from our parents that we’d be cruel to pass on to our children. It’s time to pull up stakes. It’s time for Mars.
Or maybe not.
Lighting out for the solar system is an appealing fantasy, but “A City on Mars,” an exceptional new piece of popular science by the “Soonish” authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, suggests we shouldn’t be so quick to give up on Earth. Forceful, engaging and funny, it is an essential reality check for anyone who has ever looked for home in the night sky.
Boomers Daily 