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
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,
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…
Jeffrey Toobin’s book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.
By Sean Wilentz
Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement, in his first inaugural address in 1981, that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” marked a signal moment in what has become the most successful political counterrevolution in modern American history.
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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.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 23, 2023:
The Pulitzer-winning novelist discusses the sequel to his 2021 crime story “Harlem Shuffle.”
A museum in England devoted to the best-selling children’s author, who died in 1990, condemned his antisemitic views.
James Lasdun
John Burnside
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Deborah Friedell
James Butler
Times Literary Supplement (July 21, 2023) – Moral catastrophe – The great inflation in Germany in 1923 and the Hitler putsch; Pioneer’s in Women’s Sport; Colson Whitehead’s Harlem; Dangerous children; Dating The Tempest and Shakespreare’s tutor….
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 16, 2023: This week, Jeff Goodell’s “The Heat Will Kill You First,” feels particularly apt. “This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning,” writes our critic Jennifer Szalai. But maybe you don’t want to think more than you already do about impending doom. We’ve got you covered: The issue brims with diversions — a charming novel about a reality TV show set on Mars, fiction about complicated families and a slew of good memoirs, including ones from a senior intelligence official, the war reporter Jane Ferguson and the actor Elliot Page.
In “The Heat Will Kill You First,” Jeff Goodell documents the lethal effects of rising temperatures and argues that we need to take hot weather a lot more seriously.
In Deborah Willis’s novel “Girlfriend on Mars,” a young woman enters a reality-TV contest to leave the planet, and her marijuana-farming boyfriend, behind.
GIRLFRIEND ON MARS, by Deborah Willis
Sometimes, a girlfriend needs space. Sometimes, she goes to space. That’s the — OK, obvious — premise of “Girlfriend on Mars,” a novel by the Canadian writer Deborah Willis, who knows what we’ve wished for from books all along, which is that they were TV instead.
Boomers Daily 