Tag Archives: Books

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Reviews

Books: The Top Ten Best Reviews – July 2023

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Wall Street Journal Books & Art (July 26, 2023) – A wild rowboat race across the Atlantic, the overlooked triumphs of the 20th president, notes on life behind home plate and more. A selection of July’s most noteworthy books, as discussed by The Wall Street Journal’s reviewers.

After the Funeral and Other Stories

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.

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Brothers and Sisters: The Allman Brothers Band and the Inside Story of the Album That Defined the ’70s

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.

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Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic

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.

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The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center

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.

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Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders

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.

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End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration

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.

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The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus

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.

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The People’s Justice: Clarence Thomas and the Constitutional Stories That Define Him

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.

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President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

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.

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Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – July 28, 2023

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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…

Books, Literature, Magazines, Previews, Reviews, Stories

The New York Review Of Books – August 17, 2023

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The New York Review of Books (August 17, 2023) – American Carnage – Jeffrey Toobin’s book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing; The Sadistic Brats of ‘Succession’; Rats in Paris!; Colin Grant’s Unsparing Family Portrait; Resurrecting the Porter Sisters; The True Fables of Agota Kristof, and more…

American Carnage

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.

Arts & Literature, Books, Essays, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Los Angeles Review Of Books – Summer 2023

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LA Review of Books (Summer 2023) – In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth, we found new ways of looking at the planet. Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth beneath their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. We imagined being sealed outside, dreaming of coming home.

Illicit, Offshore, Shadow, Invisible: Financial Thrillers and Global Capital

By Michelle Chihara

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.

The Banality of Heroism: Marek Edelman and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

By Samuel Tchorek-Bentall

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.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review — July 23, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – JULY 23, 2023:

Colson Whitehead on ‘Crook Manifesto’ and Harlem in the ’70s

The Pulitzer-winning novelist discusses the sequel to his 2021 crime story “Harlem Shuffle.”

Roald Dahl Museum Calls Author’s Racism ‘Undeniable and Indelible’

A museum in England devoted to the best-selling children’s author, who died in 1990, condemned his antisemitic views.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Preview: London Review Of Books — July 27, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – July 27, 2023 issue:

The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Stille

James Lasdun

Poem: ‘A False Awakening’

John Burnside

Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War by Julie McDowall

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage

Deborah Friedell

Short Cuts: Radiant Ambiguity

James Butler

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – July 21, 2023

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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….

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review — July 16, 2023

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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.

Extreme Heat Is Here to Stay. Why Are We Not More Afraid?

This illustration depicts a large, bright purple iris, its petals on fire. Behind the flaming flower, we see a bright yellow, desert-like landsape, with low orange mesas and, above them, a sky that shifts from yellow to bright red — as if the sky itself is on fire.

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.

What Does It Even Mean to Be Real?

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.

Books, History, Interviews, Podcasts, Politics, Reviews

Interviews: ‘Under The Eye Of Power’ Author Colin Dickey – ‘Panic & Paranoia’

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The American Scholar (July 14, 2023): In his new book, ‘Under the Eye of Power’, Colin Dickey asks, “What if paranoia, particularly a paranoia of secret, subversive societies, is not just peripheral to the functioning of democracy, but at its very heart?”

Under the Eye of Power by Colin Dickey: 9780593299456 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

The litany of contemporary conspiracy theories runs long: Pizzagate, QAnon, chemtrails, “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams,” “birds aren’t real.”

Some of these are funny—the rumor that Avril Lavigne and/or Paul McCartney have been replaced by doppelgängers—and some have deadly consequences, like the mass murders motivated by replacement theory or the Chronicles of the Elders of Zion.

We might like to think this is a recent phenomenon, but the first American president to espouse a conspiracy theory was actually George Washington, a freemason who believed that the Illuminati caused the French Revolution.