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Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – April 21, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 20, 2024): The latest issue features….

Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt says we’re failing children — and takes a firm stand against tech.

In this photo-illustration, a child sits on a seesaw set in a field of emerald green grass. On the other side of the seesaw is a giant smartphone.

By Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

Quick! Someone Get This Book a Doctor.

Inside the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Molly Young

Not every workplace features a guillotine. At a book conservation lab tucked beneath the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the office guillotine might as well be a water cooler or a file cabinet for all that it fazes the staff. “We have a lot of violent equipment,” said Mindell Dubansky, who heads the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation.

How the Rich and Poor Once Saw War

In “Muse of Fire,” Michael Korda depicts the lives and passions of the soldier poets whose verse provided a view into the carnage of World War I.

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The New York Times Book Review – April 14, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 12, 2024): The latest issue features  the cold-sweat-inducing premise of the two books on our cover this week, Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War” and Sarah Scoles’s “Countdown.” 

Let’s Say Someone Did Drop the Bomb. Then What?

In “Nuclear War” and “Countdown,” Annie Jacobsen and Sarah Scoles talk to the people whose job it is to prepare for atomic conflict.

The Culture Warriors Are Coming for You Smart People

In Lionel Shriver’s new novel, judging intelligence and competence is a form of bigotry.

Doris Kearns Goodwin Wasn’t Competing With Her Husband

Richard Goodwin, an adviser to presidents, “was more interested in shaping history,” she says, “and I in figuring out how history was shaped.” Their bond is at the heart of her new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”

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The New York Times Book Review – April 7, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 5, 2024): The latest issue features Stephen King’s first novel, “Carrie,” published 50 years ago. The Book Review editors weren’t sure what to do with it, so they handed it to their mystery columnist, Newgate Callendar. He called it “brilliant” but conceded, “Maybe, strictly speaking, it is not a mystery.” Still, he added, “That this is a first novel is amazing. King writes with the kind of surety normally associated only with veteran writers.”

Stephen King’s First Book Is 50 Years Old, and Still Horrifyingly Relevant

This photo still life shows a hardcover edition of “Carrie” on a brown shag carpet, next to an orange rotary-dial telephone and a section of chair caning with an analog clock balanced on top. The wall behind them is paneled wood.

“Carrie” was published in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains its enduring appeal.

By Margaret Atwood

Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon.

“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.

How Stephen King Got Under Their Skin

As “Carrie” turns 50, George R.R. Martin, Sissy Spacek, Tom Hanks, the Archbishop of Canterbury and others recall the powerful impact the writer’s work has had on their lives.

This is a photo-illustration with a movie still of blood-covered Carrie, from the Stephen King novel, at its center.

In the late ’70s the image of Carrie covered in blood at the high school dance was already part of the national narrative — in a fun way. Struggling to afford the rent and the diapers while navigating those first years of a creative journey in the big city, I had not seen the movie nor read the book. Then a copy of “The Stand” was being gobbled up by our gang — read in a fever pitch on every subway ride and first thing in the morning. Once done, the copy was passed along to the next pair of eyes and promptly devoured.

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The New York Times Book Review – March 24, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024): 

In Téa Obreht’s Latest, a Refugee Seeks Home in a Ruined World

An illustrated cross section of a house, showing rooms full of animals, trees, water plants and people.

“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.

By Jessamine Chan

THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht

The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.

An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend

In Natalie Dykstra’s hands, the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.

The serpia-toned photograph portrays a woman in a dark taffeta dress wth a bustle. Her hat is adorned with a dark plume.

By Megan O’Grady

CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra

Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.

Luminous Fables in a Land of Loss

The Tiger's Wife: A Novel See more

By Michiko Kakutani

Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.

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The New York Times Book Review – March 17, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 16, 2024): 

22 of the Funniest Novels Since ‘Catch-22’

Catch-22 eBook by Joseph Heller, Christopher Buckley | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

Because we could all use a laugh.

By Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai

When it comes to fiction, humor is serious business. If tragedy appeals to the emotions, wit appeals to the mind. “You have to know where the funny is,” the writer Sheila Heti says, “and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.” Humor is a bulwark against complacency and conformity, mediocrity and predictability.

With all this in mind, we’ve put together a list of 22 of the funniest novels written in English since Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” (1961). That book presented a voice that was fresh, liberated, angry and also funny — about something American novels hadn’t been funny about before: war. Set during World War II and featuring Capt. John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier, the novel presaged, in its black humor, its outraged intelligence, its blend of tragedy and farce, and its awareness of the corrupt values that got us into Vietnam, not just Bob Dylan but the counterculture writ large.

You’re Not Being Gaslit, Says a New Book. (Or Are You?)

“On Gaslighting,” by the philosophy professor Kate Abramson, explores the psychological phenomenon behind the hashtags.

A still from a black-and-white movie portrays a couple in Victorian dress. The man, in a dark suit, looks down disdainfully at a woman in a gown and pompadour as she gazes into the distance.

By Dodai Stewart

ON GASLIGHTING, by Kate Abramson

Don’t be so sensitive.

You’re overreacting.

You’re imagining things.

These are things gaslighters say, writes Kate Abramson.

As she explains in “On Gaslighting,” the term originated in the 1944 film “Gaslight,” and after entering the therapeutic lexicon of the 1980s, steadily made its way into colloquial usage.

As a society we have become adept at classifying actions within interpersonal relationships using therapy-speak. From “attachment style” to “trauma-bonding,” personal judgments have become diagnoses — without the assistance of a licensed professional: Anyone with a social media account or a jokey T-shirt can get in on the action. (In 2021, the flippant phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” became a popular, snide social-media shorthand for a certain kind of capitalist feminism.)

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The New York Times Book Review – March 10, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue features Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff’s new book, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” which sets out to show modern readers that the Elizabethan era did indeed produce its share of great women writers, and she details four of them across a range of disciplines. 

Some of the Best Bards Were Women

A round portrait is composed from the quadrants of four different medieval women’s faces.

In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff presents an astounding group of Elizabethan women of letters.

By Tina Brown

SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff

Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”

A Bee’s-Eye View of the World

A photo of a flower with stamen and pistils that appear to glow yellow, purple and orange in UV light.

Using clever camera methods, a new photo book illuminates how honeybees see plants and flowers.

By William Atkins

In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me, Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford us a glimpse of the world as they perceive it: His portraits of plants are, in part, prompts for interspecies empathy at a time when bees are under attack on multiple fronts, from air pollution to pesticides.

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The New York Times Book Review – March 3, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…

Kate DiCamillo Says ‘Paying Attention Is a Way to Love the World’

Credit…Rebecca Clarke

The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.

How to Speak New York

In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.

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The New York Times Book Review – February 25, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 23, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Dawn of Woman’ – Lucy Sante recounts the trials and joys of her gender transition in a memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name”…

Lucy Sante Is the Same Writer She Has Always Been

Lucy Sante poses for a portrait in the basement office of her home in Kingston, N.Y. She’s surrounded by shelves packed with books. There’s an open laptop on her desk.

In her memoir “I Heard Her Call My Name,” the author reflects on her life and embarking on a gender transition in her late 60s

The Affair That Split New York High Society

A black-and-white photograph portrays a New York City street scene. Horse-drawn vehicles, men in boaters and derbies, and women in long dresses and hats walk in front of a statue of George Washington.

In “Strong Passions,” the historian Barbara Weisberg tells the story of an explosive, lurid 1860s case that still resonates today.

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The New York Times Book Review – February 18, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 16, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Philip Gefter’s sizzling, “unapologetically obsessive” new book, “Cocktails With George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” Our critic Alexandra Jacobs calls it “a shot glass filled with one work that, alongside contemporaneous books like Richard Yates’s novel ‘Revolutionary Road’ and Betty Friedan’s polemic ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ showed how the ‘cartoon versions of marriage’ long served up by American popular culture always came with a secret side of bitters.”

Filming ‘Virginia Woolf,’ the Battles Weren’t Just Onscreen

A black and white photograph of the actors Richard Burton, left, and Elizabeth Taylor, at right, staring at each other with a very bright light occupying the middle distance behind them. The image is cropped and repeated to resemble a strip of film.

With Burton and Taylor as stars and a writer and director feuding, adapting the scabrous play wasn’t easy. “Cocktails With George and Martha” pours out the details.

‘Neighbors’ Opens the Door to a Literary Career Cut Short

An illustration is made up of three panels showing, from left: The red silhouette of a walking woman, who is slowly fading away; a partially open dormitory door with a red pennant on its front and a shadow creeping on the floor from inside; and a close-up of a Black hand on a brown background.

A story collection from Diane Oliver, who died at 22, locates the strength in Black families surviving their separate but equal surroundings.

By Alexandra Jacobs

Writer, Mother, Ex-Wife: Leslie Jamison Is a Self in ‘Splinters’

In her powerful new memoir, the author examines a life composed of conflicting identities — and fierce, contradictory desires.

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The New York Times Book Review – February 11, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (February 9, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Armed And Dangerous’ – Two new books – “One Nation Under Guns”, by Dominic Erdozain, and “What We’ve Become”, by Jonathan M. Metzl – examine America’s gun culture and its costs…

An America Where Guns Do the Talking

This illustration depicts a handgun in medium blue, drawn so that its middle section forms the outlines of the United States, beneath a jagged diagonal swath of red against a pale blue background.

Two new books consider how the country’s obsession with firearms has become an existential threat.

By Rachel Louise Snyder

ONE NATION UNDER GUNS: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain

WHAT WE’VE BECOME: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl

Last year, a friend from Brunei visited me in the United States. She is American but was raised in Sudan and has lived in Cambodia and Scotland, among other places. We were talking about the rise in anxiety among teenagers in America when another friend texted me; her daughter had just arrived home from school, where she’d spent the afternoon in lockdown. “Of course your kids have anxiety,” my Brunei friend said. “They’re being raised in a war zone.”

A Scottish Coming-of-Age Story, With a Supernatural Twist

In this illustration, a young woman stands in the middle of vast farmland filled with rolling hills, cows and a little farmhouse. In the distance, a black train billowing smoke rolls by.

In Margot Livesey’s new novel, “The Road From Belhaven,” a 19th-century farm girl’s life and maturity are complicated by her uncontrollable visions of accident and disaster.

By Daisy Lafarge

Lizzie Craig has a gift: She sees “pictures” of events before they take place. It happens first when she’s 10, with a vision in which her grandfather’s scythe slips from a whetstone and injures his leg. It’s the tail end of the 19th century in Fife, rural Scotland, where Lizzie is brought up by her grandparents on Belhaven Farm. Her pictures, more often than not, are premonitions of accidents and disasters: a hurt leg, a wheel coming off a cart, a tree hit by lightning. They tend to arrive “a few weeks before the accident,” giving Lizzie time to prepare, and sometimes, intervene accordingly.