Books

The Man Who Owns The News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
By Michael Wolff
Broadway Books, 446 pages, $29.95

Among people in what’s called “traditional media,” a genre that today ranges in intellectual and commercial standing from the indifferent to the near-extinct, it’s a commonplace to think of Rupert Murdoch as the Great Satan—as a cur, a pig and monster of the lowest order, a vulgarian whose acquisition of The Wall Street Journal in 2007 may have been the greatest tragedy ever to befall the saintly business of Anglophone journalism. This prejudice disregards the perception held by many (myself included) that The Journal has become a much more interesting and essential paper than it was—notwithstanding that a form of clinical insanity still holds sway in its editorial pages.  read more »

Love Junkie: A Memoir
By Rachel Resnick
Bloomsbury, 245 pages, $24

It’s not just the title that makes Rachel Resnick’s Love Junkie so incredibly hard to put down. There’s an urgency to Ms. Resnick’s writing, a please-you-must-let-me-just-get-this-off-my-chest quality that begins on page one—when the author discovers her ex-boyfriend has broken into her house and destroyed her computer (including a novel in progress) the night before Valentine’s Day—and continues throughout the next 240 pages.

To say that Ms. Resnick, an L.A. journalist and author of Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick, has man troubles is like saying Britney Spears has mood swings. You might think, join the club, honey.  read more »

American Lion: Andrew
Jackson in the White House
By Jon Meacham
Random House, 512 pages, $30

Following Barack Obama’s victory on Nov. 4, a prominent conservative wrote, “[He] will now bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” It was, in most parts, a compliment, though the allusion to the Colossus of Caesar gave voice to apprehensions, particularly among the vanquished, about the breadth of power that accrues to a deft politician backed by a popular mandate.

Before Barack Obama bestrode Washington, Andrew Jackson did, and his two terms in the White House are the subject of American Lion, an engaging new biography by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham.  read more »

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for
Civil Rights in the North
By Thomas J. Sugrue
Random House, 688 pages, $35

Thomas Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North was published on Nov. 4, 2008. Imagine toiling more or less monomanically for the better part of a decade in minor libraries, provincial archives and the “field”—that’s 688 pages and roughly 1,100 endnotes of toil—only to watch one seismic event send your doorstop opus crashing into apparent obsolescence. Barack Obama’s election is a historical fact—how still exhilarating and disorienting to type those words!—whose aftershocks may take generations and centuries to play out.  read more »

Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln
and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861
By Harold Holzer
Simon & Schuster, 640 pages, $30

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer
By Fred Kaplan
Harper, 416 pages, $27.95

Tried By War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander In Chief
By James M. McPherson
Penguin, 384 pages, $35

Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon
By Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt, and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr.
Alfred A. Knopf, 512 pages, $50

The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and
Legacy from 1860 to Now
Edited by Harold Holzer
Library of America, 964 pages, $40

Lincoln looms large this Thanksgiving. He always resurfaces in November, the month of the Gettysburg Address and the holiday he helped to create (it was in 1863 that he invited his fellow citizens “to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens”).  read more »

The lucky winner of the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award will be announced this week. The award was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn) in the quixotic hope that it would dissuade writers from introducing “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.” Among this year’s finalists are three Americans: Russell Banks (The Reserve), Isabel Fonseca (Attachment) and John Updike (The Widows of Eastwick). Herewith samples—in order of increasing raunchiness.

Mr. Banks’ metaphysical moment:

“[T]hey embraced and with their hands caressed each other’s breasts and backs and arms—her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone—and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.  read more »

At around 1 o'clock Thursday morning, Morgan Entrekin decided it was time to extract himself from the dance floor at Socialista and head home. "I'm having an excellent time!" he said, half empty beer in hand. "I wish I were 20 years younger! I could dance all night."

The reason he couldn't: "I have a 3-year-old! I'm tired, man. I'm old."

Mr. Entrekin used to party. Hasn't in a while. Mostly focused now on running his publishing house, Grove/Atlantic, and hanging with the wife and their little boy.

He seems genuinely fulfilled, a fact he was forced to forget last night when his colleagues in the publishing industry turned to him to reinvigorate the annual dinner known as the National Book Awards and make it fun again.  read more »

2666
By Roberto Bolaño
Farrar Straus and Giroux,
898 pages, $30

Roberto Bolaño meant 2666 to be his masterpiece. It was the tome he toiled away at in the rush before his death in 2003, sick with liver disease at the age of 50. At 900 pages, it groans with ambition, knitting together five different novellas in a sprawling story spanning decades, continents and styles. Mysterious and full of dread, 2666 is cluttered with hundreds of characters introduced by name—hungry writers, hapless detectives, hustlers and hookers, journalists and pugilists. It conveys, with literal heft, what’s glorious about art and what’s terrifying about death. There’s much to explore and revisit, to ruminate on and be haunted by.  read more »

Lives of the Artists
By Calvin Tomkins
Henry Holt and Company,
272 pages, $26

Calvin Tomkins’ new book, Lives of the Artists, is pure entertainment. Never mind the bland and even ugly jacket (a shame, since the Oxford edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, from which this book takes its name, features Vasari’s own Saint Luke Painting the Madonna, a lush and relevant choice of illustration)—Mr. Tomkins’ essays, all profiles from The New Yorker, are across the board engaging and smooth and welcoming in the magazine’s signature style. Although one could go down a very long and winding path with the sexual significance of Jeff Koons’ gigantic stainless steel casts of balloon animals, or into the psychology of Cindy Sherman’s decades of playing dress up, Mr.  read more »

"What do you think? Let me know. Meanwhile...see you about a million times this week, I suppose." That's how the Vintage book publicist and essayist Sloane Crosley closed a pitch letter she sent to this reporter on Monday afternoon. Really, what is it with this week? The National Book Awards suddenly make everyone want to go out? Or is it maybe just this whole autumn? That Bolano book launch should have been a red flag: Something, who knows what, is making publishing people want to party their brains out right about now.

Monday night, mere hours after Ms. Crosley sent that email, something like three things started happening practically simultaneously: at the National Arts Club, a  read more »