Book Review

AUDITION
by Barbara Walters
Alfred A. Knopf, 624 pages, $29.95

Journalists are, by necessity, chameleons, or, as Janet Malcolm famously put it, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

Barbara Walters, the indefatigable interviewer of everyone from Anwar Sadat to Monica Lewinsky and the Menendez brothers, would likely quibble with Ms. Malcolm’s characterization of journalists, and indeed, after reading her autobiography, Audition, one gets the sense that if Ms. Walters ever noticed that she was, perhaps, manipulating her subjects, that she managed to successfully tamp down any feelings of cognitive dissonance.

One comes away from Ms. Walters’ 624-page tome (579 pages of text, plus acknowledgements and an index, and 32 pages of photographs) convinced that her great skill—greater even than her vaunted ability to convince heads of state and famous actors and convicted killers to sit down with her and, perhaps, shed a tear or two—was compartmentalization, and that this was really the only way that a woman starting her career in television in the 1950s could ever hope to get ahead. (Of course, there are also the requisite confessions, the most scandalous of which—her affair with former Massachusetts Senator Edward W. Brooke, the first black senator since Reconstruction—had already hit front pages before her book came out, thanks to a teaser for her May 6 appearance on Oprah.)

Indeed, there are few people—men or women—still working in television today who can say they were there at the beginning. Ms. Walters, by dint of turning down a job running an executive search firm in her 30s, is one of them; she got her start, as is well known by now, working at NBC in the 1950s, first behind the camera and then, on the Today show, in front of it. There are few television personalities who are as immediately recognizable, both by visage and voice, as she is.

As everybody knows, Ms. Walters has seen, and spoken to, more famous (and infamous) people over the course of her decades-long career than almost anyone else, and she often did it with little help from her male colleagues. Her interview subjects are a kind of mind-boggling chronicle of the star firmament of the worlds of politics, entertainment, media and crime. Of course, she will also be forever remembered for Gilda Radner’s hilarious impression of her on Saturday Night Live in the ’70s, when Ms. Radner lampooned her mispronounced R’s by calling her “Baba Wawa” and making light of her failed partnership behind the anchor’s desk with Harry Reasoner on ABC News. Today she’s known to a new generation of television watchers for her role as the wise, if a bit dotty, motherly figure on the daytime television chatterfest The View.

The autobiography of television’s reigning grand dame should be a big event for the viewing public. But Ms. Walters rehashes many stories that have been told, in the press and elsewhere, many times before. This time, she’s determined to set the record straight.

There’s the case of her departure from NBC in 1976, which turned especially nasty when, she says, NBC put out a press release saying it had decided not to renew her contract because she had become such a diva, when in fact it was she who had decided, just hours before, to jump to ABC (in large part, she claims, not because of the money, but because ABC offered her an hourlong evening news broadcast, which never came to pass). To this day she remains furious at NBC’s behavior; she writes, “Our mistake, [agent] Lee Stevens’s and mine, was not to send out our own release with the news that I was going to ABC. Somehow we thought NBC would be gracious enough to work out a joint release or at least discuss what should be said. We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Then there’s her convoluted explanation of how she got involved in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal in 1987, having been manipulated by arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and Iranian businessman Manucher Ghorbanifar, who asked her to pass a message along to President Ronald Reagan regarding the American hostages in Lebanon. She did so without informing ABC, or indeed, anyone else. ABC found out months later—from Ms. Walters—because she was afraid her name would be leaked to the press. Shockingly, Roone Arledge and Dick Wald, who was then senior vice president of ABC News, continued to allow her to report the story, then proceeded to throw her under the bus when The Wall Street Journal published an article in March 1987 naming her in the affair. David Burke, who was in charge of policy and procedure at ABC News, publicly reprimanded her; Ms. Walters writes that she thinks that “ABC was wrong in reprimanding me, and I was hurt, especially because neither Roone nor Dick Wald defended me. They said it was David Burke’s territory and left the decision to him. From my point of view the news department certainly had no qualms about using the material I provided. I honestly believed that lives were at stake, which justified the exception in ABC’s news policy.”

In retrospect, Ms. Walters seems fortunate not to have lost her job. For someone who’d been in the business for over 30 years at this point—and seemed chronically insecure about being taken seriously as a journalist—the ethical lapse is, to put it mildly, mind-boggling. Not surprisingly, she was and is intent on deflecting the blame.

Perhaps it became a habit, a way of coping. In any case, Ms. Walter’s ability to keep separate the various, often competing parts of her life is almost eerie. She spends five pages on her first marriage (her second, to Lee Guber, lasted eight years; her third, to former Lorimar chief Merv Adelson, four), then abruptly announces its demise: She and hubby No. 1, Bob Katz, “had decided that our three-year marriage had died a natural death. … Oddly enough I also felt as if the marriage had never taken place. I didn’t miss anything about my relationship with Bob.” When her daughter Jackie, whom she adopted while married to Mr. Guber, becomes addicted to drugs as a teenager (she would spend three years in rehab), Ms. Walters writes, “All this time I was appearing on television, the picture of composure and tranquility. It was a nightmare.”

She does muster up some real emotion, however, when she discusses her mentally retarded older sister, Jackie, who died in 1985 of ovarian cancer, and her adopted daughter, also Jackie, who today runs a camp for troubled teenage girls in Maine. Both women would, over the years and for various reasons, cause Ms. Walters much heartache—and, she admits, much guilt. Yet one senses that if she had it to do all over again, Ms. Walters might not have done anything differently. “I was no longer second-guessing what I might have done or not done about my sister,” she writes. “That road has finally smoothed out, too.”

Doree Shafrir is a reporter at The Observer. She can be reached at dshafrir@observer.com.

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By Isabel Fonseca

Alfred A. Knopf, 306 pages, $23.95

Oh, to be Isabel Fonseca! A stunning brunette with high cheekbones and that glam international surname that suggests a yummy pairing of fontina and prosecco. Second wife of Martin Amis, easily among the top five writers working in the English language (never mind those scathing reviews of his recent Sept. 11 essay collection; part of genius is just being brave and prolific)—surely they’re not snarling at each other over whose turn it is to clean the cat’s litter box. Author of Bury Me Standing, a Serious Nonfiction Work about gypsies that took her four years of intense, virtuous immersion research ... and now, with consummate versatility, of a novel as fruity and delicious as the cocktails served on the fictional tropical island of St. Jacques, where it’s primarily set.  read more »

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc modifications and additions, so that by 1972, the same basic car had become a 3,300-pound, 375-horsepower V-8 behemoth.  read more »

A WRITER'S PEOPLE: WAYS OF LOOKING AND FEELING
By V. S. Naipaul
Alfred A. Knopf, 189 pages, $24.95

If the Nobel Prize is the ticket to one’s own funeral, as T. S. Eliot once quipped, then V. S. Naipaul is taking the scenic route. His authorized (but unsupervised) biography has just appeared in the United Kingdom, where the press mined it for every mention of his nastiness toward his first wife and mistress. But before that drama replays itself here, Mr. Naipaul has published A Writer’s People, a series of essays and reminisces in which he ruminates on the reputations of fellow writers. Derek Walcott, Anthony Powell and even Flaubert come under the knife, and serve as entry points for a kind of negative introspection: Mr. Naipaul defines himself by what he’s not.  read more »

RIGHT IS WRONG
By Arianna Huffington
Alfred A. Knopf, 388 pages, $24.95

Full disclosure: Arianna Huffington and I once had a somewhat half-hearted discussion about my possibly contributing to her eponymous über-blog, The Huffington Post. Nothing ever came of it, but in my time in Washington—even though Arianna lives mostly in L.A.—she’s been a regular guest at the same parties and meetings and panels as I have. She’s even invited me to some.

She’s a unique presence in D.C.: exuberant, friendly, eager to help people network among her vast collection of acquaintances, and, perhaps most unusually for around here, always beautifully dressed. Whenever I see her, it’s our custom to compare shoes. Hers are invariably better.  read more »

THE HAKAWATI
By Rabih Alameddine
Alfred A. Knopf, 513 pages, $25.95

The Hakawati, Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine’s third novel, is a late entry to a field that includes movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and novels like The Tin Drum—stories that process situations of extreme sadness and moral complexity through the viewpoint of a child. It’s a device with great potential for showing up the childish side of adult politics, and—always the set piece of this genre—how everyday life continues in spite of it all.  read more »

THE POST-OFFICE GIRL
By Stefan Zweig
NYRB Classics, 257 pages, $14

Christine Hoflehner, beautiful and carefree before the First World War, loses her brother, is impoverished by the collapse of her father’s business and is condemned, finally, to endless monotony as a postal clerk in a forgotten little town, earning only enough to keep herself and her ailing, widowed mother. “One village post office in Austria is much like another,” begins The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig’s 1930s novel, which has just been published for the first time in English, in a beautiful translation by Joel Rotenberg.

Christine is so thoroughly broken to her lot that she can imagine nothing else; an invitation to a Swiss resort, from a distant aunt, only frightens and upsets her. But once at the resort, dressed in her aunt’s hand-me-down clothes, she learns that she’s still young, that she’s beautiful, that she’s alive. And then, just as suddenly, she’s returned to her poverty—but it’s a poverty, now, that she can recognize.  read more »

HUBERT'S FREAKS: THE RARE-BOOK DEALER, THE TIMES SQUARE TALKER, AND THE LOST PHOTOS OF DIANE ARBUS
By Gregory Gibson
Harcourt, 274 pages, $24

Gregory Gibson’s strange and excellent new book, Hubert’s Freaks, takes its title from the Times Square freak show where photographer Diane Arbus dredged up subjects in the 1950s. The Hubert’s Museum Mr. Gibson describes is at once charming and horrible, featuring a close-knit community of “born” and “made” freaks like a fire-eater, a snake charmer, a man with no arms and a resident black “savage,” Congo the Jungle Creep. Mr. Gibson interweaves his arresting history of Hubert’s—and, by extension, New York at midcentury—with the stories of photographer Diane Arbus, born wealthy on the Upper East Side, and Bob Langmuir, a neurotic rare-book collector who in 2003 bought an old archive of treasures and memorabilia from Hubert’s, unaware that it contained lost photos by Arbus.  read more »

DICTATION: A QUARTET
By Cynthia Ozick
Houghton Mifflin, 179 pages, $24

We can’t go on. We must go on. And Cynthia Ozick does go on, and goes on wonderfully. Eighty this month, it seems she gathers energy. Maybe it’s the recent death of Saul Bellow, il miglior fabbro, that makes the value of her new book, Dictation, stand out so sharply; or maybe it’s the stingy flavor of Philip Roth’s recent writing, the sense he’s giving away what’s in the closet before the tax man can get it—but it’s now clear that the self-deprecating muse of New Rochelle, turtle to Roth’s hare, may just surpass him.

How to begin? What to praise in this delightful book? Dictation consists of four novellas about the perils of egoism and the power of the artistic personality to remake reality.  read more »

MADNESS: A BIPOLAR LIFE
By Marya Hornbacher
Houghton Mifflin, 299 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Marya Hornbacher published Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. From the cover of the paperback edition, available in the “Recovery” section of your local Barnes & Noble, a 23-year-old Ms. Hornbacher stares out at you, challenging you to reconcile this fairly regular-looking young woman with the subject matter of her book. (But she doesn’t look sick!) And now, on the cover of her new book, Madness: A Bipolar Life, here she is again: older, more grown up, less defiant. She’s recovered—sort of. This time we’re meant to understand that a nice-looking person like Ms. Hornbacher can have bipolar disorder. (But she’s so … normal!)  read more »

THE PLACE TO BE: WASHINGTON, CBS, AND THE GLORY DAYS OF TELEVISION NEWS
By Roger Mudd
PublicAffairs, 413 pages, $27.95

Why are journalists’ memoirs dull?

Could it be they’re so studiously trained to keep their own personalities out of their writing that when the time for self-expression comes, they have nothing of their own to offer?

There are exceptions, of course—nobody ever called Leibling dull or Mencken boring, and Russell Baker is always charming and elegant. But the norm is Robert Novak, the Prince of Darkness himself, who obviously reread his old columns to develop a timeline for the memoir he published last year. Tylenol PM should be so effective.  read more »

BONK: THE CURIOUS COUPLING OF SCIENCE AND SEX
By Mary Roach
W. W. Norton, 321 pages, $24.95

I wanted to like Mary Roach’s Bonk—what’s not to like about a survey of everything we know about sex, scientifically speaking, packaged in neatly minimalist hardcover with cute boffing ladybugs on the front? This book is just made for those front tables at Barnes & Noble, where it will surely do a brisk business. But while full of fascinating and occasionally useful information, Bonk feels, after a while, disorganized and stuntish, like a series of magazine articles haphazardly strung together. There are larger points to be made about the history and nature of sex research and the difficulties faced by the scientists who undertake it, but Ms. Roach doesn’t waste much time on those. She lost me somewhere between “testicular grafting” and the husband who mistook his wife’s urethra for her vagina.  read more »

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET—AND HOW TO STOP IT
By Jonathan L. Zittrain
Yale University Press, 342 pages, $30

As part of a program called “verkeersbordvrij,” the Dutch city of Drachten has done away with traffic signs, parking meters and even parking spaces. The result, so far, has been shocking: Traffic safety has improved dramatically. Under some circumstances, it seems, people will take it upon themselves to look out for their own and others’ best interests, even in the absence of rules and enforcement.  read more »

THE REAL MCCAIN: WHY CONSERVATIVES DON'T TRUST HIM AND WHY INDEPENDENTS SHOULDN'T
By Cliff Schecter
PoliPoint Press, 187 pages, $14.95

FREE RIDE: JOHN MCCAIN AND THE MEDIA
By David Brock and Paul Waldman
Anchor, 240 pages, $14.95

The photograph on the cover of The Real McCain shows John McCain locked in an awkward embrace with George W. Bush at a campaign rally in 2004. It became, at one point, an icon for left- and very-left-of-center media outlets and blogs, a visual reminder of Mr. McCain’s literal embrace of a more neoconservative stance.

It has become since then a symbol of simplistic criticism leveled against the Republican presidential candidate.  read more »

BAD MONEY: RECKLESS FINANCE, FAILED POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
By Kevin Phillips
Viking, 239 pages, $25.95

Remember the good old days? No, I don’t mean the sun-drenched, suburban 1950s. Nor do I refer to the go-go giddiness of the ’90s. I’m talking about last summer—before the days of “credit crunch” and “market downturn” and all the other phrases commentators trot out to signal that the American economy is on the verge of unraveling altogether. In those days, less than a year ago, we might not have been booming, but we weren’t busting, either.  read more »

THE MODERN CON MAN: HOW TO GET SOMETHING FOR NOTHING
By Todd Robbins
Bloomsbury, 227 pages, $16.95

Todd Robbins is a con man, and a good one, too. This is both comforting and disturbing as one reads his new book, aptly titled The Modern Con Man: How to Get Something for Nothing. Mr. Robbins has made the rounds of the late-night talk shows, performed at Carnegie Hall and swindled a thousand suckers. He parts fools from money with the precision of a surgeon. On the other hand, one can’t help but think, paging through his musings, descriptions of tricks and the other sundry segments that make up the text, that his biggest con is having made you part with $16.95 for a copy of his book.  read more »

I WAS TOLD THERE'D BE CAKE
By Sloane Crosley
Riverhead Books, 228 pages, $14

Okay, I confess. I Facebook-stalked Sloane Crosley, and she has some very cool friends, including Leon Neyfakh, who profiled her for The Observer (“The Most Popular Publicist in New York”—Nov. 27, 2007). So believe me, I was totally psyched not to like her book of personal essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake. I’ve never had this problem of instantly wanting to hate Nora Ephron (my goddess), or David Sedaris, or even Cynthia Heimel or Fran Lebowitz, and I’m basically too in awe of Adam Gopnik’s organizational skills to begin to check him out on the Web. But this is different. Just for starters, I can’t decide whether to identify with the author or with her parents. I might even have been Sloane Crosley, if I’d had a better work ethic, straighter hair and a different life.  read more »

HOME: A MEMOIR OF MY EARLY YEARS
By Julie Andrews
Hyperion, 352 pages, $26.95

My favorite moment in Julie Andrews’ memoir comes after the first New Haven preview of My Fair Lady. Rex Harrison had a pre-performance panic attack, the show ran to an endless three and a half hours, but Julie Andrews was feeling pretty good. Her vaudeville training had helped her rise to the occasion, and the show had gone on.

She was sitting in her dressing room bathing in self-approbation when the door flew open and designer Cecil Beaton stalked in. Beaton picked up a little yellow hat Ms. Andrews wore in the show, and slammed it onto her head.

“Not that way, you silly bitch,” he hissed, like some road company Roger DeBris, “This way!”  read more »

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
Viking, 242 pages, $24.95

The hazy golden specter of F. Scott Fitzgerald looms over all first novels by young white male Ivy League graduates, but it looms especially large over this one, by Keith Gessen, a limpid-eyed, sensual-mouthed founding editor of the intellectual journal n+1.

It’s there in the title, of course, and in Mr. Gessen’s brittle romanticizing of New York City, though the chic neighborhoods have shifted since the Jazz Age (“Oh god—what would it take to live in such a place?” one character thinks, perambulating among the gleaming muscleds of Chelsea. “What reserves of strength? What reserves of cash?”) It’s there in the titular young men’s melancholy enthusiasm for booze (“I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly” confides one sozzled sophomore), and in their ambivalent pursuit of tempestuous, flighty women who “italicized things” and wear navel rings.  read more »

THE STORY OF FORGETTING
By Stefan Merrill Block
Random House, 313 pages, $25

Stefan Merrill Block’s debut novel, The Story of Forgetting, takes place during the course of one summer in Texas in the late 1990’s, but it also manages to cover decades, looking far back into one family’s history, tracing the Alzheimer’s gene that passed from parent to offspring in a pattern nearly as regular as houndstooth check. It deals with scientific inquiry, putting one humble family under the microscope, but The Story of Forgetting manages to feel big and small in perfect proportion, at once intimate and universal. Mr. Block has made something very beautiful out of something very ugly: a disease that steals people’s lives from them.  read more »

THE HITLER SALUTE: ON THE MEANING OF A GESTURE
By Tilman Allert
Metropolitan, 106 pages, $20

What if the Nazis had greeted each other with high fives instead of that stiff-armed, sharp-handed salute? What if Germans had been allowed to say hello to one another by name instead of invoking their Führer?

Tilman Allert’s The Hitler Salute, a joyously sharp account of a massively evil slice of human history, doesn’t treat the Nazis’ obligatory two-word, one-arm greeting as a product of evil, but as its enabler. He argues, movingly, that the salute wounded Germans’ sociability, connectedness and personal sovereignty, warping the holy human order.

A nation that’s forced to adopt inhuman gestures, in other words, is fated to oblige inhuman horrors: First hellos disappear, then morality.  read more »

BUSH'S LAW: THE REMAKING OF AMERICAN JUSTICE
By Eric Lichtblau
Pantheon Books, 334 pages, $26.95

Back in another world, my undergraduate days in the early 1980’s, a roommate of mine loved the tidbit (gleaned from my Washington childhood) that if you uttered certain words on a long-distance call, a transcript might end up on the desk of some spy catcher at the National Security Agency. “Hey, Pete, got those I … C … B … M’s for me today?” became a sort of punch line. “The briefcase with cash will be in the phone booth!”

I doubt college kids today are playing the same sort of game, just as the rest of us know better than to joke about explosives in front of T.S.A. inspectors. You might actually get yourself in trouble.  read more »

PARENTING, INC.: HOW WE ARE SOLD ON $800 STROLLERS, FETAL EDUCATION, BABY SIGN LANGUAGE, SLEEPING COACHES, TODDLER COUTURE, AND DIAPER WIPE WARMERS—AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR CHILDREN
By Pamela Paul
Times Books, 290 pages, $25

During my prenatal tour of Lenox Hill Hospital a few months back, the head labor nurse informed our group of nervous New York City parents-to-be that a private room would cost around an extra $600 a night—which isn’t covered by insurance. Those rooms are in high demand, nurse Terri said of the coveted real estate, “and we can’t promise you one unless your last name is ‘Brinkley’ or ‘Trump.’”

You could immediately detect sparks of anxiety flying among the couples on the tour, everyone performing a silent calculus like bidders at a Christie’s auction. How do we get the private room? Is it worth the money? Is this child going to bankrupt us?  read more »

THE SECOND PLANE: SEPTEMBER 11: TERROR AND BOREDOM
By Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knopf, 211 pages, $24

Martin Amis’ The Second Plane is a collection of essays, short fiction and book reviews arranged in order of composition. It thus functions, in some ways, as a walking tour of the motley post-Sept. 11 mind—its fears, madnesses, misapprehensions and insights. While the book’s first essay, written in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, aches with the same “reflexive search for the morally intelligible” (as Mr. Amis elsewhere calls it) that animates the desperate relativism of the paleo-left, the end of the book finds him, having now enlightened himself on modern Islam’s intellectual traffic jam, condemning the very same left’s “hemispherical abjection” to the “Thanatism” of radical Islam.  read more »

OUR STORY BEGINS: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
By Tobias Wolff
Alfred A. Knopf, 379 pages, $26.95

Reading Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff’s new collection of stories, is like being buttonholed by a drunk with a glass jaw. At first he’ll strike you as charming, and the fluency of his anecdotes may mislead you into finding him entertaining. But very soon you’ll realize that he only talks—never listens—and that the lone subject of all his talking is his own inadequacy. The answer he’s seeking—that he’s in pain precisely because he’s self-involved, and that all his suffering would end as soon as he stopped talking about it—seems self-evident, but he never quite puts his finger on it. As the evening wears on, and your discomfort becomes visible—as your eyes wander to the door, and you begin checking your watch and rattling the ice in your empty highball glass—the drunk will begin daring you to hit him. “Come on, tough guy!” he’ll bellow. “You think you know pain?” And if, finally, you give in and deck him, he’ll lie on the floor, bleeding triumphantly, and crow that he’s been victimized yet again.  read more »

THE TEN-YEAR NAP
By Meg Wolitzer
Riverhead, 351 pages, $24.95

I loved Meg Wolitzer’s previous novels The Wife (2003) and The Position (2005), but when I told a friend that her new book, The Ten-Year Nap, was about stay-at-home mothers who lamented their old selves, and my friend said, “Disenchanted mommies—it’s so cliché to be one now,” I knew she had a point. (She then added, “For the record, I was whining about motherhood before it was cool.”)

The four female protagonists in The Ten-Year Nap don’t so much whine as wonder, somewhat naïvely, how they wound up abandoning their dreams, or at least their careers, to wade into the deceptively placid waters of round-the-clock domesticity. Being a full-time mother is a job for which they are vastly overqualified (as are most women these days) but for which they nonetheless marshal their energies like CEO’s. “You, the brainy, restless female, were the one who had to keep your family life rolling forward like a tank. You, of all people, were in charge of snacks,” thinks one of them. “Your hands tore apart the cellophane on six-packs of juice boxes, while your head cocked to hold a cordless phone into which you spoke the words, ‘Maureen? Hi, it’s Mason Buckner’s mom. I’m calling to set up a playdate with Jared.’ You had to say ‘playdate’—that nonword that had been so easily welcomed into the lexicon—and you had to say it without irony.”

Much has been written, both fictional and non-, about the compromised position of mothers in the 21st century. Rachel Cusk, Allison Pearson, Judith Warner, Linda Hirshman, Leslie Bennetts have all brought their own particular insight to the muddle that is modern motherhood. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no room for more on the subject, but it raises the bar higher.

And unfortunately, though Ms. Wolitzer’s light-handed satire is always a pleasure to read, the women in The Ten-Year Nap represent such a broad spectrum that the novel winds up feeling at once relevant and diffuse.

There’s Amy, a lawyer-turned-SAHM, despite the fact that her mother held feminist consciousness-raising groups in her living room in the 1970’s; Roberta, who didn’t so much reject her former life as an artist but tire of the constant struggle it entailed; Jill, a former academic who got derailed when her dissertation was rejected; and Karen, the daughter of Asian immigrants and quant jock who doesn’t regret her decision to leave her high-paying analyst job to look after her twin boys one bit.

The SAHM’s compare themselves to the WM’s, especially to Penny Ramsey—mother of three and museum director—of whom they are in particular awe. The men, meanwhile, are semi-present in the whole exhausting venture. “The husbands they lived with were part past, part future. They were not the future itself. They were not, apparently, the fruits of feminism, offered up to the daughters of its founders as a perfect gift.”

Ms. Wolitzer, who is gentle and nonjudgmental with her main characters, sends three of the four back to work, although in lesser capacities—the price paid for the decision to opt out. As the authorial voice in The Ten-Year Nap notes, with a sigh of resignation, “Change always required slightly longer than a generation.”

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a contributing writer for Elle. She can be reached at books@observer.com.

THE COMPLEX: HOW THE MILITARY INVADES OUR EVERYDAY LIVES
By Nick Turse
Metropolitan, 271 pages, $23

Give Nick Turse credit: It’s not every would-be polemicist who has enough faith in the message to irrevocably—and hilariously—undermine himself two pages into his first book. Yet there they are, in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph of the introduction to The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, three words embalmed parenthetically in a text that (the reader will soon discover) rather persistently confuses parentheses for exclamation points.  read more »

LAST LAST CHANCE
By Fiona Maazel
Farrar Straus and Giroux, 337 pages, $25

Lucy Clark is a 30-year-old drug addict (downers, mostly) who grew up in a 7,000-square-foot New York City apartment, whose father killed himself after a deadly strain of plague disappeared from his lab under mysterious circumstances, whose mother is a crackhead, whose precocious 12-year-old half-sister is obsessed with plague and whose grandmother, Agneth, is convinced that reincarnation is possible and that she, indeed, has lived before. There’s also a best friend who married the only man Lucy ever truly loved, as well as Lucy’s current boyfriend, Stanley, an alcoholic seeking a uterus for his dead wife’s frozen eggs, and a host of other characters who make Fiona Maazel’s debut novel Last Last Chance alternately entertaining and frustrating.  read more »

BLACK POSTCARDS
By Dean Wareham
Penguin Press, 324 pages, $25.95

Another slog through Europe, and Dean Wareham, respected, almost-famous singer and guitarist, is finally realizing that elusive rock ’n’ roll fantasy. An Andalusian beauty with a “fantastic chest” is making eyes at him through the whole show. Afterward, she takes him home. She’s a flight attendant, and rather than slip into something more comfortable, she actually dons her uniform for the night’s proceedings. His conscience goes missing as they cavort until dawn. His penance begins when she sings him her favorite song: “More Than Words,” by Extreme.  read more »

THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS
By Jonathan Coe
Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95

A middle-aged woman named Gill arrives at the home of her recently deceased Aunt Rosamond and discovers an empty Scotch glass, an empty bottle of sedatives and a set of cassette tapes stacked near a recorder and microphone. “These are for Imogen,” says a note near the tapes. “If you cannot find her, listen to them yourself.” This irresistible opening—as economic, in literary terms, as a flinch or a raised eyebrow in a comic sketch—establishes the tense, elegiac tone of Jonathan Coe’s small masterpiece, The Rain Before It Falls. A departure from the boisterous novels Mr. Coe is known for (his breakthrough was 1994’s What a Carve Up!, inanely retitled The Winshaw Legacy in America), the new novel traces the roots of a savage act through four generations of women.  read more »

ON EMPIRE: AMERICA, WAR, AND GLOBAL HEGEMONY
By Eric Hobsbawm
Pantheon, 97 pages, $19.95

What a difference a decade makes in the course (and discourse) of empire!

In the year 303, the emperor Diocletian issued the Edict Against the Christians, which ushered in the great persecution that still bears his name. Across the Roman Empire, it was martyrs, martyrs everywhere; churches were razed and imperial offices purged—it was the harshest crackdown in Roman history.

By 313, (Saint) Constantine was in charge. The Edict of Milan had granted official tolerance to the new religion. The Roman center of power was shifting irrevocably east to Byzantium, and Europe was well on its way to becoming the fragmented Christian realm out of which would eventually emerge the modern nation-state as we know it today.

Or maybe—and here we move from course to discourse—as we remembered it yesterday.

AT THE START of our own rather Diocletianean decade, there was no book trendier than Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Breathtaking in scope and verve (the authors posing as the millennial Marx and Engels—or at least a Y2K Deleuze and Guattari), Empire’s 450-odd pages notably failed to offer many specifics on colonial governance or colonial wars or, indeed colonies. Those matters, explained the authors, were the provenance of musty old imperialism—the larval industrial precursor to the information-age, hypercapitalist, post-everything empire that destiny demands we struggle against.

But who exactly are the bad guys in this novel social formation? (We take it it’s no longer the men with guns and ships and racial theories.) Suffice it to say that, circa 2000, Empire was about as tentacular and tendentious a concept as the Matrix: “Politics is given immediately,” wrote Messrs. Hardt and Negri. “Empire forms on this superficial horizon where our bodies and minds are embedded. It is purely positive.”

Right.

The joke, of course, is that, eight years and a few hundred thousand dead Iraqis later, even the bleakest late-90’s dystopias—remember those festive WTO protests?—have been rendered impossibly quaint. Now that waterboarding’s all the rage, fire-hosing don’t seem half-bad.

As the unimaginable decade draws down, I suspect the zeitgeist read might well become Eric Hobsbawm’s On Empire: America, War, and Global Hegemony, in scope and tenor the very antithesis of Hardt and Negri. There’s nothing at all breathtaking about Mr. Hobsbawm’s latest: 97 pages, four short essays, considerably more questions than answers. The subtitle may be the most definitive statement made in the entire book. Mr. Hobsbawm’s modesty sometimes charms and occasionally irritates—and it makes On Empire as close to essential reading as the times allow.

FANS OF THE author will find “modest” a surprising adjective, especially since “ambitious” more accurately describes his 60 years as a professional historian. Eric Hobsbawm is the sort of intellectual that only the British Commonwealth (née Empire) seems to produce in any appreciable numbers nowadays: erudite and accessible, an old-school scholar who writes for a popular audience. Ninety years young, he’s also a Marxist whose Marxism arrives un-prefixed by “cultural” or “feminist” or “post” anything. His career-defining project—a four-part history of the modern world: The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848; The Age of Capital: 1848-1875; The Age of Empire: 1875-1914; and The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991—indeed displays all the certainty inherent in that unvarnished “ism.”

The new book begins as a recapitulation and extension of Mr. Hobsbawm’s heroic project. In the collection’s first essay, “On the End of Empire,” he opens with a personal measure of extremes. Other than the Scandinavians and the Swiss, he writes, “when I was born, all Europeans lived in states which were part of empires in either the traditional monarchical or the nineteenth-century colonial sense of the word.” So, too, Africans and South and Southeast Asians. The Ottoman Empire had just dissolved, and the Chinese Empire was barely six years deceased. “In the course of my lifetime, all this has gone.”

Clearly, for Mr. Hobsbawm, empire is a specific (if historically pervasive) phenomenon, defined by the unambiguous physical, economic, and social stratification between metropole and periphery (colony). He pointedly scolds nostalgists who imagine this arrangement, for all its faults, as more orderly and tolerant than what came after; the idea of a Pax Romana or Pax Britannica promoting “globalization and world peace” is “claptrap.” The old empires may well have been peaceful within their borders, but a necessary condition of this internal stability was the existence of an international system of great-power rivalry. Every Rome needs its Carthage.

What happened to all this since Mr. Hobsbawm’s birth is recounted in a second essay appropriately titled “War and Peace in the Twentieth Century.” Succinctly put: “Clarity was replaced by confusion”—in two ways. First, “the line between interstate conflicts and conflicts within states—that is, between international and civil wars—became hazy,” as evidenced by the Americans in Vietnam and the Soviets in Afghanistan. Second, “the clear distinction between war and peace became obscure.” As I write this, China and the government on Taiwan are officially “at war”; the United States and the Iraqi insurgency are not. Next Page >

THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE: THE GREAT COMIC-BOOK SCARE AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA
By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pages, $26

Earlier this month, a trendy bar in the East Village hosted what it billed as a “Nerd Nite” about the death of 1950’s horror comics, advertising the event with a listing that evoked all the kitsch and sensationalism of classic pulp: “A Senator looking to raise his national profile for a White House bid! A sex-obsessed psychiatrist blaming comics for juvenile delinquency! A comic book publisher on speed! Blood! Sex! Violence! Communism! A showdown in the Senate! Censorship! Death!”  read more » Next Page >

A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL
By Frigyes Karinthy
New York Review Books, 288 pages, $17.95

Frigyes Karinthy, in his day a well-known Hungarian humorist and writer, was in his favorite cafe in Budapest when he heard the roaring of a train that no one else heard. On subsequent evenings his hallucination repeated itself at precisely the same time. He developed blinding headaches, and he also began to go blind—very slowly.

His memoir A Journey Round My Skull, reissued this month by New York Review Books, covers his experience of mysterious symptoms; the diagnosis of a brain tumor; his travel to Stockholm to see a preeminent neurosurgeon; and the successful surgery to remove it. But the greater part of the book concerns his strange avoidance of the gravity of his problem. As if an inverted Kafka, Karinthy wanders from doctor to doctor, looking for one who doesn’t annoy him, receiving no firm diagnosis, making light of his symptoms, delivering himself occasionally of profound but disconnected observations and drifting slowly toward blindness and death without ever losing the breezy tone of a Viennese society reporter.  read more » Next Page >

THE GOOD RAT
By Jimmy Breslin
Ecco, 270 Pages, $24.95

It starts with a kiss. In the opening lines of Jimmy Breslin’s The Good Rat, the consummate mob reporter is practicing his smooching in the mirror: “If you kiss,” he says, “it is a real sign that you’re in the outfit.” And if you’re kissing the cheeks he’s kissed, you’d better get it right.  read more » Next Page >

THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
Pantheon, 369 pages, $30

Asked by Ford Maddox Ford to contribute to a memorial supplement to the Transatlantic Review in honor of the recently deceased Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway groused about friends who disparaged Conrad; he complained that most of the people he knew thought Conrad a bad writer and T. S. Eliot a good one. Papa disagreed: “If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave, Mr. Conrad would shortly appear … and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”  read more » Next Page >

WHY WE’RE LIBERALS: A POLITICAL HANDBOOK FOR POST-BUSH AMERICA
By Eric Alterman
Viking, 334 pages, $24.95

How many liberals does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, but it really gets screwed.

Sadly, this dry heave of a joke achieves the same level of sophistication as much of what passes for American political discourse. As we all know, through tactical genius the right has managed to turn the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” into the ultimate empty signifiers; they are now no more than rhetorical cudgels wielded by partisan politicians.  read more » Next Page >

THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF CHINESE FOOD
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Twelve, 291 pages, $24.99

I ordered lunch today from the go-to Chinese restaurant around the corner from my office. It came in a large plastic bag that held a large paper bag filled with all sorts of containers: a white, microwave-safe bowl of chicken with cashews; a box of vegetable fried rice; a tightly sealed bowl of hot and sour soup; a small wax-paper bag with one vegetable spring roll; another small wax-paper bag with those crispy noodles; a Ziploc bag thoughtfully packed with a fork, a spoon, two napkins, one packet of Chinese mustard, one packet of soy sauce and two packets of duck sauce, plus a separately packaged fortune cookie; and finally, in its own stapled brown bag, a pint of homemade lemonade. Total cost: $9.48.  read more » Next Page >

I DON'T BELIEVE IN ATHEISTS
By Chris Hedges
Free Press, 185 pages, $25

Poor Einstein. Long after his death, atheists and agnostics, Jews and secular Jews are still trying to claim him for their side. Einstein was remarkably coy—you can interpret his quotes on God and religion in many contradictory ways. But reading Chris Hedges’ new book, it’s not hard to believe the well-circulated rumor (which has even popped up in Richard Dawkins’ chat rooms) that during his life Einstein was more wary of one group claiming him than all the others: the atheists.

Proselytizing atheists have been very busy recently writing religion-bashing best sellers, from Sam Harris’ The End of Faith (2005) to Mr. Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) to Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007). Mr. Hedges’ book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, is a deep investigation into the historical and intellectual failings of these atheists’ ideas.  read more » Next Page >

LUSH LIFE
By Richard Price
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 455 pages, $26

Part rubbernecker, part moralist, part mimic, novelist Richard Price would have made an excellent reporter. (In fact, Mr. Price attended the news conferences and trial of child killer and racial fabricator Susan Smith as research for his brilliant 1998 novel Freedomland.) In Lush Life, Mr. Price has turned his journalistic eye and gothic imagination on the gentrification of the Lower East Side to compelling and very occasionally melodramatic effect.

Obsessed as always by race, poverty and deceitful witnesses, Mr. Price builds a mystery out of two “black and/or Hispanic” males robbing three of the “Young, Gifted and White” transplants to the neighborhood. In a fictional echo of the real-life killing of Nicole du Fresne, who defied muggers and was shot to death on Clinton Street in 2005, the young actor Ike Marcus breezily dismisses the demand for money and takes a fatal bullet in the chest.  read more » Next Page >

THE RUNNER: A TRUE ACCOUNT OF THE AMAZING ADVENTURES AND FANTASTICAL LIES OF THE IVY LEAGUE IMPOSTER JAMES HOGUE
By David Samuels
The New Press, 176 pages, $22.95

ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART
By David Samuels
The New Press, 370 pages, $26.95

“The fact,” writes David Samuels, “that we lie like crazy while pretending to always tell the truth is such a common narrative strategy in American literature and American lives that we frequently confuse our wishful imaginings with reality.” A truth-teller, Mr. Samuels has just published two appreciations of the Great American Lie: The Runner and Only Love Can Break Your Heart, a collection of his essayistic journalism.  read more » Next Page >

THE KONKANS
By Tony D’Souza
Harcourt, 308 pages, $25

In the early 16th century, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama came ashore on the western coast of India, claiming the land for Portugal and the local people for Christ. The Indians converted by da Gama developed a culture distinct from that of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. The Konkans eat pork and beef, speak a language derived from Portuguese called Konakani and, in the 500 years since da Gama’s arrival, have evolved a reputation as merchants. Yet their customs retain traditional Hindu elements—Konkan weddings, for example, include Hindu dances.

How do proud Catholics like the Konkans reconcile their devotion to the One True God with India’s dizzying religious and cultural diversity? Same way everyone copes with difference: through a combination of denial and amused contempt. “Hindus, surprisingly, are rather admired by the Konkans,” explains Francisco, the half-Konkan, half-white narrator of Tony D’Souza’s promising second novel.  read more » Next Page >

COMFORTABLY NUMB: HOW PSYCHIATRY IS MEDICATING A NATION
By Charles Barber
Pantheon, 280 pages, $26

It’s hard to believe it, but our little baby is growing up. Prozac has just turned 20.

It’s been quite a heady two decades for our favorite mood-boosting pill, a regular Drew Barrymore kind of childhood, with books and articles and wanton declarations accompanying each stage of its precocious life. There were the wide-eyed Listening to Prozac years, the wild and fawning Prozac Nation years, even the troubled teenage years when it was dogged by accusations that it caused everything from suicide to impotence.  read more » Next Page >

HIS ILLEGAL SELF
By Peter Carey
Alfred A. Knopf, 272 pages, $24.95

Peter Carey is an expat Australian who has lived in New York City for almost 20 years, and it would seem that he’s homesick. Not just for his country, but for what he was when he lived there: a boy, and then a member of that pride of boomers who came of age in the 70’s. And so he’s concocted an unlikely tale whose true arc is to get out of the range of Bloomingdales and into the wilds of Queensland, which he portrays as a ramshackle redoubt for the most disenfranchised of the pot-addled, dropout generation. Here, far from the chic haunts of what used to be called “Bergdorf Goodman hippies,” he elaborates a lengthy double kidnapping.

First our