Books

Occupational Hazards
By Jonathan Segura
Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $14

The 11-page first chapter of Occupational Hazards, a wildly foul-mouthed, mostly derivative, modestly suspenseful and ultimately likable debut novel by Jonathan Segura (an editor at Publishers Weekly), includes the words "fuck," "fucking," "fuckers," "fucked," "goddamned," "hell," "shit," "suck," "fart," "pisser," "prick," "blowjob," "jerk off" and "sumbitch."

But coarsest of all is our pill-addled, flake-shouldered, chain-smoking, un-smiling boozehound hero and narrator, whose name happens to be Cockburn, though that’s not pronounced like it looks.

Cockburn speaks in icy little sentences. He writes half-heartedly—no, eighth-heartedly—for the Omaha Weekly News-Telegraph, headquartered in a yellowing basement. The sign on the office door is written in marker.  read more »

The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s
By G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot
The Penguin Press, 422 pages, $27.95

These days "liberal" is a word rarely used as anything but a pejorative in American politics. In the 1960s, however, it was the dominant political philosophy in Washington. President Lyndon B. Johnson ran his election campaign in 1964 as a liberal against archconservative Senator Barry Goldwater and won in a landslide. There were overwhelming Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a solid Supreme Court majority led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that viewed itself as a liberal, activist vanguard.  read more »

Gotta question for the hippest Japanese novelist (and memoirist) around? Log in to Time magazine's Web site, where you can ask Haruki Murakami a question and possibly read the answer in a subsequent interview. Be careful what you ask for. Your question will be posted underneath the submission form after you enter it, along with your name and location.

So what does America want to know about Mr. Murakami? Here are some gems:

Posted by Kwok Sing in Amsterdam:

In stories like ‘Slow Boat to China’ or in your novel ‘wind up bird’, you are cautiously tackling the problematic relationship between Japan and China which of course is shaped by the historical events in the 20th century.  read more »

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Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter
By Rick Shenkman
Basic Books, 210 pages, $25

I remember an uproarious night almost seven years ago at Shay’s Pub and Wine Bar in Cambridge, Mass.—my local hangout. I was entertaining a friend, also an historian, who was in town doing research. He told me that earlier in the day, he’d wandered into a nearby radical bookstore, where he spotted a title by Bob Avakian, the creepy, reclusive and mercifully irrelevant chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, U.S.A. The book was called (get this), Democracy: Can’t We Do Better Than That?

We both burst into snarky laughter.  read more »

Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times
By Susan Quinn
Walker, 325 pages, $25.99

Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable froufrou, or as dangerous provocateurs, but as crucial contributors to a nation’s psychological and moral health.

Imagine, then, a country like the United States in 1935, when desperation impelled a government to do things that no American government would do today no matter how desperate.

Susan Quinn’s Furious Improvisation—a great title for an excellent book, a model of narrative history—tells the story of the Federal Theatre Project, an offshoot of F.  read more »

How Fiction Works
By James Wood
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pages, $24

James Wood is in relax mode. That doesn’t mean he’s lost his edge, or that he can’t get excited—enthusiasm is still his best party trick: He gushes like Old Faithful. But these days he’s got nothing left to prove, no one to elbow out of the way. He’s the undisputed champ. If the poet laureate had a critic laureate to keep her company, James Wood would be he—why else would Harvard have appointed him professor of the practice of literary criticism? Why else would The New Yorker have poached him last year from The New Republic?

Of course, he still needs an audience—readers willing to read about reading and writing—and perhaps relax mode is Mr.  read more »

The last word on Christopher Hitchens’ ludicrous Vanity Fair waterboarding caper, Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial put-down in The New Republic (www.tnr.com):

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn—but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection.  read more »

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes
By Jim Holt
W. W. Norton, 160 pages, $15.95

The eponymous shaggy-dog story is about a boy who enters his dog into a local "shaggy-dog contest." When the dog wins, the boy enters him into a larger regional contest, and then, when the dog wins that one, too, into still another, until finally, after a tortuously narrated series of trials and triumphs, the dog makes it into the quadrennial World Shaggy Dog contest—which he loses badly, prompting the boy to remark, "Well, maybe he wasn’t so shaggy."

Depending on how it’s delivered, a shaggy-dog joke can be either a cruel prank at the listener’s expense, or a sort of joyous exercise in silliness, in which the punch line, a joke’s nominal destination, serves only as a pretext for the journey.  read more »

Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife
By Marie Winn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 295 pages, $25

Ten years ago, Wall Street Journal reporter Marie Winn told the story of her enchantment with a pair of red-tailed hawks nesting on the ledge of a tony Fifth Avenue co-op in clear view of the Central Park boat pond. Ecstatic birdwatchers kept vigil, generously offering use of their expensive-looking binoculars to all who passed. The story had legs (wings?) and her book, Red-Tails in Love, was a hit. Aside from making Pale Male and Lola (as they were dubbed) into posterbirds for the resurgence of New York’s long-depressed hawk population, Red-Tails did something akin to setting down an oral tradition for the first time.  read more »

Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction
By Lisa Chamberlain
Da Capo, 212 pages, $25

In Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, Lisa Chamberlain examines the changing cultural and economic landscape that has defined—and been defined by—Generation X’s reluctant, late-onset adulthood. The elusive subtitle is the first hint of the economic vagueness to come. (After 188 pages I was still unsure of the precise meaning of "creative destruction," which—and I am frantically thumbing through my copy of the book here—was used by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to refer to the process by which a capitalist economy constantly destroys and reinvents itself.  read more »