THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 3, 2023): The new issue features “THE EXHIBITIONIST“, a barbed comic novel about a midwardly mobile London family by Charlotte Mendelson; “THE GUEST“, by Emma Cline, “about one woman’s week of lying, scamming and conning her way through the Hamptons; CROOK MANIFESTO, the sequel to Colson Whitehead’s 2021 novel “Harlem Shuffle” (and the middle volume of a planned trilogy), and more….
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (August 27, 2023) The new issue features: James McBride’s Latest Is a Murder Mystery Inside a Great American Novel; The First Chinese American Movie Star and the Cost of Glittering Fame, and more…
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” opens with the discovery of a skeleton in a well, and then flashes back to explore its connection to a town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history.
By Danez Smith
A few weeks ago, around the same time I was working on this review, I visited the Guggenheim with my fiancé. The exhibition on display as we trekked up the museum’s famous spiral was “Measuring Infinity,” a marvelous retrospective on the work of the great Venezuelan artist Gego. A German Jew who fled Nazi persecution in Europe, Gego arrived in Venezuela in 1939 and went on to become one of the most important artists to emerge from Latin America in the 20th century. Her work speaks to a deep curiosity about the interrelation of shapes, things and the dimensions created by those relationships.
It was, according to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, “one of the most racist films ever made in America.” “Old San Francisco” (1927) featured a white actor playing a Chinese villain passing as a white man (got that?) who plans to sell an innocent white girl into white slavery until he is conveniently crushed by an earthquake. Before his grisly end he is aided in his nefarious scheme by an Asian character identified only as “a flower of the Orient,” played by an ingénue named Anna May Wong.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 20, 2023: The issue features “never before told” narrative histories including a tale of the female botanists who surveyed the Grand Canyon in 1938, a recent biography of the 19th-century “abortionist of Fifth Avenue” and the book on this week’s cover: Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip,” which brings into focus a thriving artistic community that existed at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.
In Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.
BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, by Melissa L. Sevigny
Let’s start this story on a sun-blistered evening in August 1938. A small band of adventurers had just concluded a 43-day journey from Utah to Nevada — although perhaps “journey” is too tame a description for a trip that had required weeks of small wooden boats tumbling down more than 600 miles of rock-strewn rivers. The goal was twofold. First, to simply survive. And then, to chart the plants building homes along the serrated walls of the Grand Canyon.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 13, 2023: The annual thrillers issue features – a tense murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship; a heist novel involving rough diamonds, crooked lawyers and masters of the double cross; and an especially creepy serial-killer novel, to name just a few.
In “Flirting With Danger,” Janet Wallach tells the story of Marguerite Harrison, who traded a life of privilege to become America’s first international female spy.
By Chloe Malle
FLIRTING WITH DANGER: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy, by Janet Wallach
Anyone complaining about a canceled Delta flight would do well to channel Marguerite Harrison. The United States’ first international female spy, Harrison crisscrossed the globe by rickshaw, propeller plane, camel, inflated goatskin raft and rail freight car and once brightly described a trans-Siberian voyage, in which she was wedged between sacks of tea and oats on the back of a troika in a blizzard, as “a rare and delightful experience.”
From left: John Fairfax; Tom McCleanCredit…From left: Daily Mail/Shutterstock; Tom McClean
In “Completely Mad,” James Hansen tells the stories of two men who in 1969 vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
COMPLETELY MAD: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic, by James R. Hansen
The day before the Apollo mission landed two men on the moon, a British man named John Fairfax waded into Hollywood Beach, Fla., greeted by masses of cheering fans, having been the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Eight days later, another Briton, Tom McClean, pulled his dory up a deserted beach in Blacksod Bay, Ireland, having rowed solo across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. While Fairfax was acclaimed and feted, McClean walked to the closest pub, alone.
In marine biology, a whale fall is the body of a dead whale that has slowly descended to the bottom of the ocean. Scavengers strip its flesh, crustaceans and other creatures colonize its skeleton and its decaying bones help sustain countless organisms for years to come, part of the delicate balance of the undersea ecosystem.
While Billy Wilder’s 1957 film adaptation portrays Ariane (played by Audrey Hepburn) as a doe-eyed ingénue, Claude Anet’s original character is considerably more enigmatic. Credit…Allied Artists/Getty Images
Reading Claude Anet’s provocative 1920 novel “Ariane: A Russian Girl,” the reader may yearn for a little less conversation.
By Gemma Sieff
It would be nice if we had put to bed, so to speak, witless and reductive double standards about female promiscuity. Have you heard the one that goes, “A key that opens many locks is a master key, yet a lock that is opened by many keys” is … unprintably bad? Me neither — until I saw it on TikTok.
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,
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.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 9, 2023: In Too Deep – Laura Trethewey’s “The Deepest Map” plumbs the new world of oceanic exploration, and its dangers; “Fancy Bear Goes Phishing”; Lorrie Moore’s New Novel; Read your way through L.A., and more…
Laura Trethewey’s “The Deepest Map” explores the new world of oceanic exploration — and its dangers.
By Simon Winchester
In the past days, the world has been riveted by the story of the Titan submersible, which we now know imploded some 1,600 feet from the wreckage of the Titanic, killing all aboard. Beyond the human tragedy — and the macabre fact that James Cameron’s blockbuster is trending online — comes an opportunity for serious reflection.
“Undaunted,” Brooke Kroeger’s new history of women in journalism, tracks the victories, setbacks and pathbreaking careers that have marked the decades-long fight for gender parity in the field.
The New York Times editorial council, photographed in 1951.
By Jane Kamensky
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Anne O’Hare McCormick. I hadn’t, and as the director of Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, which holds peerless collections documenting pioneers in print journalism, I could have, and definitely should have. Brooke Kroeger’s compendious and lively “Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism” introduced me to her.
If We Are What We Eat, We Don’t Know Who We Are
In “Ultra-Processed People,” Chris van Tulleken takes a close look at the franken-snacks that barely resemble what they’re imitating.
Over the years, some 100 people have translated the entire “Iliad” into English. The latest of them, Emily Wilson, explains what different approaches to one key scene say about the original, and the translators.
“There has to be chemistry,” says the writer and prolific translator, whose second book will come out next year. “You don’t need prior knowledge of, say, Iceland or Icelandic in order to appreciate Victoria Cribb’s translation of Sjón.”
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